How Our Sense of Fairness Can Help Us Feel More Deserving

Everyone can recognize unfairness. All it takes to see it is moving aside the layers of status beliefs. Those constructs protecting our privilege. Yet the status of “deserving" dictates how we use fairness. This castrates fairness. We do this with arbitrary "fairness" rules which exclude people for irrational reasons.

Deserving and fairness intertwine in our psyche. This relationship comes from every angle in life. It is ubiquitous, and yet many aspects are invisible and untraceable. In the end, it forces us to depreciate ourselves.

We know when we're treated unfairly. And to assimilate this disconnect we rationalize. As children, that's our only defense - we have no capacity to enforce fairness. So we come to believe that we don’t deserve. This keeps us safe. We avoid entering into a state of (unacceptable) rage at unjust treatment.

Over time we divorce the relationship between deserving and fairness. Eventually we forget that relationship. We see them as separate entities. As adults, it’s our job to pull this relationship out of the closet, to examine it, and to reignite our sense of deserving.