The World Makes Promises Life Doesn’t Deliver

When we were young-er, the rules were pretty simple. If you don’t do well in school, then you won’t get a good degree, you won’t get a good job, and life is just gonna be difficult for you. If you don’t play nice, then no one’s gonna wanna play with you, and you’ll be all alone. If you don’t work hard, then you won’t get what you want or need, and you’ll be unhappy and unsuccessful.

Then you learn that what the world has so rationally but unfairly left out is that even if you do all those things, if you do work hard and if you do play nice, there is no guarantee you’ll be happy and successful. You have to work extra hard for that, extra smart, more than the baseline, and even then, it’s still not a guarantee.

Then you learn that you can be lonely in a room full of people, and that you can be a miserable success; that the definitions of happiness, success, and love are all subjective. And if you’ve played by the rules, did all the right things, and you’re unsatisfied with where you are, then it is you who has made the mistake; you’ve either chased after the wrong things or chased after them for the wrong reasons. You should’ve paid closer attention. 

The world calls it life. It’s just how things go sometimes; life is unfair like that. You can’t always get what you want, no matter how badly you want it. Understood and accepted. But let’s make a small distinction. It is the world that is unfair, not life. Life makes no promises. It gives no preferential treatment to anyone.  You get the same thing everyone else gets— time. What you choose to do with that time is of no concern to it.

How you choose to define life is of no concern to it either. It’s a pursuit, it’s a temporary stop, it’s a test, it’s evolution and survival, it’s whatever you decide it to be. We’ve evolved enough to be able to give life a grander, more personal meaning. The only one who objects to these definitions is the world. The only one who tells you how you should spend the time you’re given is the world. Life doesn’t tell you what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong; the world does.

The world creates unfairness, false promises, and adversity, and then it blames life. It alleviates its guilt and justifies its flaws this way. And we are quick to agree because that is what the world taught us. It is easier to accept the mistreatment of the world when we have a scapegoat—some grand force that is beyond our control to relieve us from holding ourselves accountable for the injustice and deception of the world we’ve created. So, the next time you feel cheated or mistreated, cursed or despairing, turn your attention to life. The world is just an unreliable middleman.