The One Thing We All Deserve

            Been a tough couple of years, hasn’t it? On the plus side you’ve managed to survive the bat flu, murder hornets, Zoom meeting fatigue, and Soylent Tide Pods. You’re still alive! And also? I have good news. I want to share something – something that I think we all need to hear. Prepare your feathers for ruffling.

            Merriam-Webster defines the transitive verb “deserve” as follows… “to be worthy, fit, or suitable for some reward or requital.” If you don’t know what requital is, the definition of that word is “something given in return,” but that’s the topic of another post. By someone else. I’m not going to teach English. So anyways, in layman’s terms, to deserve something is, at least from the way most of us use the word, to be thought of as worthy of the thing that has happened. In reality, the concept of deserving something really is quite intangible. It’s a mental construct. It doesn’t exist in the real world.

The word ‘deserve’ has too-often come to accompany self-victimization. We use it as way to assign incongruence in our expectations between what we thought should have happened and what actually happened. We have become so arrogantly righteous in the way we think about how the Universe should unfold its happenings and that it better tell its story our way… or else we will be really, really, super angry-mad at it. We act as though there is some great scale in the sky somewhere, where odd little men watching us through odd little telescopes are making sure that everything is A-OK and fair and happy and right and just.

But inevitably, things aren’t fair, at least in part because there are, in fact, no Karmic Gnomes watching over us out in the Great Beyond. And when the scales don’t tip our way and the Universe doesn’t tell its story the way we wanted it to, we get indignant and angry. We decide that we didn’t like that reality, we didn’t like the story; we wanted the should.

            Why are we so invested in should?

            We all seek to be deserving in some way – it is a human impulse to seek acceptance. When people around us agree that we were deserving of something good that has happened to us, that means that they think we did good enough things or are inherently a good enough person to have earned it. This makes us feel good.

            Similarly, when people around us find that we were not deserving of something bad that has happened to us, that means that they perceive us as a better person than that which normally has those bad things happen to them. This also, in a way, makes us feel good. It can make us feel relief or comfort when something terrible has happened, especially when we feel that something is completely and utterly beyond our control.

            In its worst manifestation, we are both of those people – the should-er and the should-ee. We absolutely love to tell ourselves encouraging things, to rationalize away at what should have been.

We seek this type of validation constantly from ourselves and others because we want to feel that we have earned our place when we do well and that we just got a bad hand when we fail. We don’t want to consider that maybe we missed, or weren’t good enough, or smart enough, or whatever enough. It’s more convenient to think that something else intervened, rather than take it on the chin as being your fault, or even simply chalking it up to it just not being your day. In short, we feel entitled to the best, most ostentatious outcome possible, even when we fail. And we want everyone around us to participate in that charade with us.

            Life isn’t fair. The Universe doesn’t care, and it will keep on hurtling through the cosmos no matter how you feel. Bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad people. All we can do is to attempt our best and put ourselves in positions in which we have better chances at better outcomes. When we allow these defense mechanisms to get in the way of our ability to forgive ourselves for failure and give us a sense of deserving only the best outcomes even with minimal effort, we have succumbed to the cardinal Millennial sin called entitlement.

            So then, what is it, what is the one thing we deserve?

            Nothing. Absolutely Nothing. Not a goddamned thing.

            I don’t mean Nothing as in, you get a big ol’ fat sack of rocks for Christmas, or someone is going to knock on your door, punch you in the throat, and take all your stuff.

            I mean Nothing as in… there is no deserve. To deserve something is simply to have the entitled attitude of taking credit for the good shit and making excuses for the bad shit. It’s dodging the bad decisions, the foul balls to the face, and every painful, stumbling, drop that leaves us bleeding, crying, and screaming for comfort and a warm bed. And it also means we have our efforts stolen from us, too – all of those: every good decision, the bottom-of-the-ninth walk-off home-runs, and the victories in which we are left panting and bleeding, standing amidst the cinematically clearing dust around your broken and defeated demons. You lose that, too.

Proclaiming that you did or did not deserve something is demanding that the providence of God or Karma or the incarnate will of a deific, flying bowl of spaghetti need step into your world and make things the way you want them to be. Over six billion people on this planet, but damn it all to Hell, you better get your way, right? It’s childish, whinge-ing bullshit. It takes away from us the victories of having triumphed over something while simultaneously affording the limp-dick luxury of dodging the responsibilities of our failures.

Sometimes (or oftentimes) things just don’t work out. That’s life. Don’t hide behind a mental construct to explain hypothetical scenarios. Get back at it and hammer on until it is. Concentrate on that, and you won’t worry about what should have happened.

            There is no deserve. There is no should. There is only what is. Make your should what is by controlling it yourself. Don’t leave it up to the gnomes.