life is not unfair essay

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Life isn't fair - deal with it.

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There seems to be a lot of talk these days about what is fair, and what is not. President Obama seems to believe life should be fair – that “everybody should have a fair shake.” Some of the 99% seem to believe life has treated them unfairly, and some of the 1% percent feel life hasn’t treated them fairly enough. My questions are these: What is fair? Is life fair? Should life be fair? I’ll frame the debate, and you decide…

We clearly have no choice about how we come into this world, we have little choice early in life, but as we grow older choices abound. I have long believed that while we have no control over the beginning of our life, the overwhelming majority of us have the ability to influence the outcomes we attain. Fair is a state of mind, and most often, an unhealthy state of mind.

In business, in politics, and in life, most of us are beneficiaries of the outcomes we have contributed to. Our station in life cannot, or at least should not, be blamed on our parents, our teachers, our pastors, our government, or our society - it’s largely based on the choices we make, and the attitudes we adopt.

People have overcome poverty, drug addiction, incarceration, abuse, divorce, mental illness, victimization, and virtually every challenge known to man. Life is full of examples of the uneducated, the mentally and physically challenged, people born into war-torn impoverished backgrounds, who could have complained about life being unfair, but who instead chose a different path – they chose to overcome the odds and to leave the world better than they found it. Regardless of the challenges they faced, they had the character to choose contribution over complaint.

I don’t dispute that challenges exist. I don’t even dispute that many have an uphill battle due to the severity of the challenges they face. What I vehemently dispute is attempting to regulate, adjudicate, or legislate fairness somehow solves the world’s problems. Mandates don’t create fairness, but people’s desire and determination can work around or overcome most life challenges.

It doesn’t matter whether you are born with a silver spoon, plastic spoon, or no spoon at all. It’s not the circumstances by which you come into this world, but what you make of them once you arrive that matter. One of my clients came to this country from Africa in his late teens, barely spoke the language, drove a cab while working his way through college, and is now the President of a large technology services firm. Stories such as this are all around us – they are not miracles, nor are they the rare exception. They do however demonstrate blindness to the mindset of the fairness doctrine.

From a leadership perspective, it’s a leader’s obligation to do the right thing, regardless of whether or not it’s perceived as the fair thing. When leaders attempt to navigate the slippery slope of fairness, they will find themselves arbiter of public opinion and hostage to the politically correct. Fair isn’t a standard to be imposed unless a leader is attempting to impose mediocrity. Fair blends to a norm, and in doing so, it limits, inhibits, stifles, and restricts, all under the guise of balance and equality. I believe fair only exists as a rationalization or justification. The following 11 points came from a commencement speech widely attributed to Bill Gates entitled Rules for Life. While many dispute the source , whether it was proffered by Bill Gates or not, I tend to agree with the hypothesis:

Rule 1: Life is not fair -- get used to it!

Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping -- they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Here’s the thing – we all face challenges, and life treats us all unfairly. We all make regrettable choices, and we all suffer from things thrust upon us do to little if any fault of our own. When I suffered a debilitating stroke at an early age, I certainly asked myself “why did this happen to me?” I could have felt sorry for myself and became bitter, I could have thrown in the towel and quit on my family and myself – I didn’t. It took two years of gut-wrenching effort, but what I thought was a great injustice at the time changed my life for the better. Today, you couldn’t tell I ever had a stroke. The greatest adversity life can throw at you simply affords you an opportunity to make changes, improve, and get better.

By the title of today’s column you have no doubt surmised I believe life is not fair, nor do I believe we should attempt to socially or financially engineer it to be such. Fair is not an objective term – it is a matter of perspective filtered by a subjective assessment. My subjective assessment is that fair is an entitlement concept manufactured to appease those who somehow feel slighted. Life isn’t fair - #occupyreality

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Life’s not fair! So why do we assume it is?

Doctoral Student in Developmental Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Larisa Hussak receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

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Income inequality in America has been growing rapidly, and is expected to increase . While the widening wealth gap is a hot topic in the media and on the campaign trail, there’s quite a disconnect between the perceptions of economists and those of the general public.

For instance, surveys show people tend to underestimate the income disparity between the top and bottom 20% of Americans, and overestimate the opportunity for poor individuals to climb the social ladder. Additionally, a majority of adults believe that corporations conduct business fairly despite evidence to the contrary and that the government should not act to reduce income inequality.

Even though inequality is increasing, Americans seem to believe that our social and economic systems work exactly as they should. This perspective has intrigued social scientists for decades. My colleague Andrei Cimpian and I have demonstrated in our recent research that these beliefs that our society is fair and just may take root in the first years of life, stemming from our fundamental desire to explain the world around us.

Believing in a legit reason for bad situations

When the going gets tough, it can be emotionally exhausting to think about all the obstacles in one’s path. This idea has been used by many researchers to explain why people – especially those who are disadvantaged – would support an unequal society. Consciously or not, people want to reduce the negative emotions they naturally feel when faced with unfairness and inequality.

To do this, people rationalize the way things are. Rather than confronting or trying to change what is unfair about their society, people prefer to fall back on the belief that there’s a valid reason for that inequity to exist.

This drive to relieve negative feelings by justifying “the system” seems to play an important role in people’s thinking about their societies all over the world . Therefore, it almost seems to be human nature to explain away the inequalities we encounter as simply the way things are supposed to be.

But are negative emotions necessary for people to justify the society around them? According to our findings , perhaps not.

Quick assumptions aren’t necessarily right

We make these kinds of justifying assumptions all day long, not just about social inequality. We’re constantly trying to make sense of everything we see around us.

When people generate explanations for the events and patterns they encounter in the world (for instance, orange juice being served at breakfast), they often do so quickly, without a whole lot of concern for whether the answer they come up with is 100% correct. To devise these answers on the spot, our explanation-generating system grabs onto the first things that come to mind, which are most often inherent facts. We look to simple descriptions of the objects in question – orange juice has vitamin C – without considering external information about the history of these objects or their surroundings.

What this means is the bulk of our explanations rely on the features of the things we’re trying to explain – there must be something about orange juice itself, like vitamin C, that explains why we have it for breakfast. Because of the shortcuts in this explanation process, it introduces a degree of bias into our explanations and, as a result, into how we understand the world.

There’s gotta be a reason…

In our research, Andrei and I wanted to see if this biased tendency to explain using inherent information shaped people’s beliefs about inequality. We hypothesized that inherent explanations of inequalities directly lead to the belief that society is fair. After all, if there is some inherent feature of the members of Group A (such as work ethic or intelligence) that explains their high status relative to Group B, then it seems fair that Group A should continue to enjoy an advantage.

What we found confirmed our predictions. When we asked adults to explain several status disparities, they favored explanations that relied on inherent traits over those that referred to past events or contextual influences. They were much more likely to say that a high-status group achieved their advantage because they were “smarter or better workers” than because they had “won a war” or lived in a prosperous region.

Furthermore, the stronger a participant’s preference for inherent explanations, the stronger their belief that the disparities were fair and just.

In order to ensure that this tendency wasn’t simply the result of a desire to reduce negative emotions, we told our participants about fictional disparities on other planets. Unlike the inequalities they may encounter in their everyday lives, our imaginary inequalities (for instance, between the Blarks and the Orps on Planet Teeku) would be unlikely to make participants feel bad. These made-up scenarios allowed us to see that people do jump to the same kinds of justifications even when we aren’t trying to alleviate negative feelings.

Kids buy into inherent explanations for inequality

We also asked these questions of an additional group of participants who should be even less likely to experience anxiety about their place in society when thinking about status disparities on alien planets: young children. Just like our adult participants, children as young as four years of age showed a strong preference for inherent explanations for inequality.

When we asked them to generate explanations, they were almost twice as likely to say that the high-status Blarks were more intelligent, worked harder, or were “just better” than the low-status Orps than they were to mention factors such as the neighborhood, family or history of either group. This preference promoted a belief that conditions were fair and worthy of support.

These findings suggest that the public’s misconceptions of inequality are, at least to some extent, due to our basic mental makeup. Primitive cognitive processes that allow us to create explanations for all the things we encounter in the world may also bias us to see our world as fair.

But the tendency to rely on inherent explanations, and adopt the subsequent belief that things are as they should be, is not unavoidable.

When we told children, for instance, that certain disparities were due to historical and contextual factors (rather than built-in, fundamental features of the aliens), they were much less likely to endorse those disparities as fair and just. Taking time to consider the many factors – both inherent and external – that contribute to social status may be an effective tool for developing a reasoned and critical perspective on our society in the face of growing inequality.

• Income inequality
• Social sciences
• Developmental psychology
• Negative emotions

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November 24, 2014

The problem isn’t that life is unfair – it’s your broken idea of fairness

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Unless you’re winning, most of life will seem hideously unfair to you.

The truth is, life is just playing by different rules.

The real rules are there. They actually make sense. But they’re a bit more complicated, and a lot less comfortable, which is why most people never manage to learn them.

Rule #1: Life is a competition

That business you work for? Someone’s trying to kill it. That job you like? Someone would love to replace you with a computer program. That girlfriend / boyfriend / high-paying job / Nobel Prize that you want? So does somebody else.

We’re all in competition, although we prefer not to realise it. Most achievements are only notable relative to others. You swam more miles, or can dance better, or got more Facebook Likes than the average. Well done.

It’s a painful thing to believe, of course, which is why we’re constantly assuring each other the opposite. “Just do your best”, we hear. “You’re only in competition with yourself”. The funny thing about platitudes like that is they’re designed to make you try harder anyway . If competition really didn’t matter, we’d tell struggling children to just give up.

Fortunately, we don’t live in a world where everyone has to kill each other to prosper. The blessing of modern civilisation is there’s abundant opportunities, and enough for us all to get by, even if we don’t compete directly.

But never fall for the collective delusion that there’s not a competition going on. People dress up to win partners. They interview to win jobs. If you deny that competition exists, you’re just losing. Everything in demand is on a competitive scale. And the best is only available to those who are willing to truly fight for it.

Rule #2. You’re judged by what you do, not what you think

Society judges people by what they can do for others . Can you save children from a burning house, or remove a tumour, or make a room of strangers laugh? You’ve got value right there.

That’s not how we judge ourselves though. We judge ourselves by our thoughts .

“I’m a good person”. “I’m ambitious”. “I’m better than this.” These idle impulses may comfort us at night, but they’re not how the world sees us. They’re not even how we see other people.

Well-meaning intentions don’t matter. An internal sense of honour and love and duty count for squat. What exactly can you and have you done for the world?

Abilities are not prized by their virtue. Whatever admiration society awards us, comes from the selfish perspectives of others. A hard working janitor is less rewarded by society than a ruthless stockbroker. A cancer researcher is rewarded less than a supermodel. Why? Because those abilities are rarer and impact more people.

We like to like to think that society rewards those who do the best work. Like so:

But in reality, social reward is just a network effect. Reward comes down mostly to the number of people you impact :

Write an unpublished book, you’re nobody. Write Harry Potter and the world wants to know you. Save a life, you’re a small-town hero, but cure cancer and you’re a legend. Unfortunately, the same rule applies to all talents, even unsavoury ones: get naked for one person and you might just make them smile, get naked for fifty million people and you might just be Kim Kardashian.

You may hate this. It may make you sick. Reality doesn’t care. You’re judged by what you have the ability to do, and the volume of people you can impact. If you don’t accept this, then the judgement of the world will seem very unfair indeed.

Rule #3. Our idea of fairness is self interest

People like to invent moral authority. It’s why we have referees in sports games and judges in courtrooms: we have an innate sense of right and wrong, and we expect the world to comply. Our parents tell us this. Our teachers teach us this. Be a good boy, and have some candy.

But reality is indifferent. You studied hard, but you failed the exam. You worked hard, but you didn’t get promoted. You love her, but she won’t return your calls.

The problem isn’t that life is unfair; it’s your broken idea of fairness.

Take a proper look at that person you fancy but didn’t fancy you back. That’s a complete person . A person with years of experience being someone completely different to you. A real person who interacts with hundreds or thousands of other people every year.

Now what are the odds that among all that, you’re automatically their first pick for love-of-their-life? Because – what – you exist? Because you feel something for them? That might matter to you , but their decision is not about you .

Similarly we love to hate our bosses and parents and politicians. Their judgements are unfair. And stupid. Because they don’t agree with me! And they should! Because I am unquestionably the greatest authority on everything ever in the whole world!

It’s true there are some truly awful authority figures. But they’re not all evil, self-serving monsters trying to line their own pockets and savour your misery. Most are just trying to do their best, under different circumstances to your own.

Maybe they know things you don’t – like, say, your company will go bust if they don’t do something unpopular. Maybe they have different priorities to you – like, say, long term growth over short term happiness.

But however they make you feel , the actions of others are not some cosmic judgement on your being. They’re just a byproduct of being alive.

Why life isn’t fair

Our idea of fairness isn’t actually obtainable. It’s really just a cloak for wishful thinking.

Can you imagine how insane life would be if it actually was ‘fair’ to everyone? No-one could fancy anyone who wasn’t the love of their life, for fear of breaking a heart. Companies would only fail if everyone who worked for them was evil. Relationships would only end when both partners died simultaneously. Raindrops would only fall on bad people.

Most of us get so hung up on how we think the world should work that we can’t see how it does. But facing that reality might just be the key to unlocking your understanding of the world, and with it, all of your potential.

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Life is not Fair: Get Used to It! A Personal Perspective on Contemporary Social Justice Research

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• Published: 15 July 2023
• Volume 36 , pages 293–304, ( 2023 )

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This paper offers a very personal perspective on the Social Justice research world, much of which is to be found in this journal. It is my contention that this research has become too inward looking and detached from other mainstream and important issues. I also highlight some areas that I think neglected such as the Problem of Evil and Stoicism as a coping mechanism for misfortune.

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Introduction

Many academic disciplines are interested in the concept of justice, particularly law, philosophy, sociology and theology. Justice is about equality/equity, fairness, impartiality, legality, and trustfulness. However, one person’s justice is another’s injustice, and there is the rub: Most people would say justice is desirable, it is how they diversely define (and hope to achieve) it that can be the (academic) problem.

The title of this paper comes from the famous advice of the multi-billionaire Bill Gates who said young people should accept the realities of life. He noted that they needed to keep striving for success despite the obstacles that stand in our way. Instead of giving up or being discouraged, strive to be resilient and find ways to overcome challenges. It was not a call to campaign against injustice, but rather a way to try to cope with the inevitable truth. A friend, however, suggested I add “ So get used to challenging it ” arguing as so many Justice Researchers do, that we should all “get involved”, while I believe there may be a time and place to simply accept the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”.

Psychology too has had a long-standing research agenda into justice. Developmental psychologists are interested in moral development, and how children come to understand fairness and justice in the world. Social psychologists have been interested in how people understand and react to justice and injustice, as well as, most importantly in their view, how to reduce injustice. Personality/Differential psychologists have been interested in systematic individual differences in beliefs about, and behaviour relating to, various forms of justice. Clinical psychologists have been concerned with how people cope with injustices visited upon themselves and others. Forensic psychologists have become concerned with how best to deal with those who are perpetrators or victims of injustice. Work psychologists have also been interested in Humanitarian Work Psychology, are concerned with how fair incomes and treatment in, and at, work can benefit groups and individuals alike. More recently, Environmental psychologists have become very involved in these issues especially concerns with climate change, farming practices and misuse of environmental resources.

As Torres-Harding et al., ( 2012 ) noted, “ social justice is consistently described as a value or belief, encompassing the idea that people should have equitable access to resources and protection of human rights. In addition, definitions of social justice typically involve power. Each definition encompasses the idea that structural and social inequalities should be minimized, and that society should work toward empowerment with people from disadvantaged or disempowered groups. Thus, participation, collaboration, and empowerment are all key components of social justice work. Social justice is a fundamental value of the community psychology field, particularly due to its emphasis on eliminating oppressive social conditions and promoting wellness” (p. 78).

In this paper, I will offer some personal reflections on social justice research. I was asked to reflect on a some very specific questions which I do in the conclusion.

The Bigger Picture

As noted above, most of the social sciences have been interested in justice, because of the importance and relevance of this topic to so much in life. People are confronted with injustices of many kinds and have to try to make sense of, and then deal with them. The more interesting question though is, when and how do people decide some system is actually broken, and needs fixing itself.

Ellenbogen ( 1986 ) in a very memorable and humourous way distinguished between how different religions understand injustice, and how psychotherapists deal with it. Of course, these are rather simple-minded stereotypes, and possibly even “offensive” to certain groups, because of the way they try to encapsulate and distinguish between various conceptualisations of injustice. Nevertheless, I believe it illustrates forcefully some of the numerous and profound differences in the ways injustice/evil/sh*t is considered.

It is clear injustice, here described as “sh*t happens” is an extremely important issue and that many struggle for an explanation for its existence, but also how to cope with it. It is very big topic indeed. The fundamental “take-away” for me is take a much wider view.

What this eccentric and amusing table illustrates is something, I feel, is important. It is about how individuals and groups have tried to come to terms with the fact that life is not fair and that we need a way of understanding why. Equally, we need to know how best to deal with the vicissitudes of everyday life: to right wrongs, prevent injustice, cruelty and evil: that is doing something, anything, about it.

In many ways, it is important to understand social justice in a wider context. One such approach that I really appreciated was the recent attempt of Krebs ( 2008 ) with his evolutionary account of the acquisition of a sense of justice. He argued that the mechanisms that give rise to a sense of justice evolved to help early humans maximize their gains from cooperative social interactions. A sense of justice encourages group members to distribute resources in fair ways ( distributive justice), to honour the commitments they make to others ( commutative justice), to punish cheaters ( corrective justice), and to develop effective and co-operative ways of resolving conflicts ( procedural justice). Thus, we inherit a disposition to react positively to being treated fairly and negatively to being treated unfairly, to pass judgement on those who treat others fairly or unfairly, and to feel obliged to pay others back by rewarding and punishing them appropriately.

“To achieve these goals, people use the tools with which they have been endowed by natural selection, especially language, perspective-taking abilities, and social intelligence. Although it is naïve to expect people to possess a universal sense of justice that consistently disposes them to make fair and impartial decisions that jeopardize their adaptive interests, it is realistic to expect people to be able to counteract one another’s biases in ways that enable them to make fair decisions in contexts in which such decisions advance everyone’s interests in optimal ways” (p. 244).

In this sense, social justice is a very big and important problem with which people have struggled for all time. The question is what psychologists “bring to the table”? And how has the last 30–50 years of Social Justice research made any theoretical or practical headway?

Justice Sensitivity and Justice Research

I have been struck at conferences and reading journals how “philosophically homogenous” researchers (and hence their research) is, in this area. Indeed, I wonder if it is possible that Justice Researchers are attracted to the field because of their particular justice sensitivity? The idea was identified over 35 years ago (Huseman et al., 1987 ). I consider whole issue of sensitivity to injustice maybe as Freud observed: we study our own problems.

Equity sensitivity is usually classified as relatively stable personality trait, which means that people are supposed to react to just or unjust situations in a consistent way though others have argued it is situation specific (Wijn & van den Bos, 2010 ). Researchers have determined three different types of justice-sensitive people namely benevolents, equity sensitives, and entitleds . Benevolents are referred to as “ givers ” because they are willing to bestow as much as possible to the people and organizations but are relatively unaffected by unfair treatment. They are prepared to experience personal discrimination, unfairness and injustice for a variety of personal reasons, and unlikely to complain or attempt some recompense. Some religions would strongly approve of this behaviour which is self-sacrificial for the greater good.

The counterparts are entitleds who are also labeled “ takers ” . Their ultimate ambition is to maximize their outcomes. They appear selfish, egocentric and deeply concerned about getting what they can from others. In between, there are “ equity sensitives ” who seek to achieve a balance between input and outcome.

As these different categorizations suggest, there are systematic and predictable behavioural differences between the three types. Benevolents are more likely to tolerate unfair payment, whereas entitleds are more likely to react stronger than benevolents to pay inequities by reducing their job performance (Allen & White, 2002 ). There are interesting questions about the development of justice sensitivity and how it can be appropriately moderated.

To be clear, there is in this area the older construct of equity sensitivity and the newer construct of justice sensitivity. The focus of equity sensitivity is on the outcome of an allocation—which limits the construct to distributive justice. The focus of justice sensitivity is on the role a person can play in any incidence of injustice. A person can be the victim of injustice (victim sensitivity), the observer of injustice (observer sensitivity), the beneficiary of injustice (beneficiary sensitivity), and the perpetrator of injustice (perpetrator sensitivity). Thus, the concept of justice is not limited to distributive justice in the justice sensitivity construct but includes all kinds of injustice (distributive, procedural, retributive, restorative, interactive, legal).

Another important difference is the assumed dimensionality. The justice sensitivity construct conceptualizes all facets (victim, observer, beneficiary, perpetrator) as potentially independent components (a person can be victim sensitive and beneficiary sensitive). By contrast, equity sensitivity is one-dimensional construct (a benevolent person cannot be entitled). These differences have important implications on measurement and research on developmental origins, behavioural outcomes, and correlations (with personality traits, for example). Justice sensitivity research has shown that all facets have some uniqueness which means that they overlap only partially and that they have unique relations with other variables. Yet all studies show a systematic pattern of overlap among the facets. Observer-, beneficiary-, and perpetrator sensitivity correlate highly among each other and seem to reflect a genuine concern for justice for others. Victim sensitivity correlates only moderately with the other factors.

I wondered, however, given the above ideas, that it maybe possible to divide researchers themselves into three categories: justice/equity sensitive, justice/equity indifferent, justice/equity accepting. The first category would be people eager to perceive, understand and, more importantly, redress or reduce injustice anywhere they see it. Of course, they may be much more sensitive to injustice in certain areas (education, health, work) and more or less personally committed to various forms of action. Essentially, they “filter” a great deal of the world, through a justice lens. Thus, they would be attracted to social justice research and probably be very homogenous in terms of their socio-political outlook. Perhaps younger researchers have a keener—and different—sense(s) of injustice at being left behind, than do say older researchers. But they are fellow-travellers and attracted to social justice research as a way of partly creating it.

Second, there are those who understand the concept of justice and injustice, but it is less important to them than a whole range of other activities and issues. They do not go out of their way to consider and possibly rectify issues of injustice. In this sense, they are relatively indifferent to justice issues and would not be particularly interested in research in the area. They would be a very heterogeneous group. This may be the case unless and until some injustice affects them, or they are affected by injustices (and material hardships, etc.) in their earlier life.

Third, there are those who are accepting of the “vicissitudes of life”, seeing most injustices perhaps as normal and a consequence of the human condition about which little can, or should, be done. “Life is not fair: get used to it”. There are all sorts of reasons why this occurs, many of which are difficult if not impossible to redress. Their basic philosophy is: You are “dealt-a-hand” in life; you cannot choose your parents; sh*t happens. The best strategy is not to be obsessed by some retribution but rather learn to cope and exploit what you have been given. They would therefore be less interested in social justice research and in devising strategies to increase it.

Inevitably, these various “types” may hold highly negative views about the other which can be most clearly seen in political debate. Thus, the justice accepting may view the justice sensitive as impractical, “bleeding-heart” liberals whose attempts at rectifying justice are ineffective, misplaced and indeed morally wrong. On the other hand, the justice sensitive may view the justice accepting as callous, unethical and morally corrupt. It could be argued that awareness and mutual understanding is the key to solve these justice dilemmas between justice “types”.

The question for research is this. Do the personal views on justice-injustice and equity-equality of researchers bias their hypotheses, methods and conclusions? Do they design studies to attempt to provide evidence for their particular theories and neglect, ignore and “pooh-pooh” those who take an opposite perspective? Are too many Social Justice researchers disinterested enough to do good work?

Believing the World is Just

My “way-into” this area was initially through the Just World literature. I read Lerner’s ( 1980 ) book while doing my doctorate and was completely hooked. My first study was on the BJW and attitudes to poverty (Furnham & Gunter, 1984 ), while the second was a cross-cultural study comparing BJWs in a very unjust society, namely South Africa, with one arguably more just, namely Great Britain (Furnham, 1985 ). I worked on the topic for years (Furnham, 1991 , 1992 , 1995 , 1998 ). I later published two reviews (Furnham, 2003 ; Furnham & Procter, 1989 ). I went to conferences in America and Germany and met many of the top scholars in the field. It was, and still is, a comparatively small group dominated by Canadians and Germans. The field is flourishing and expanding (Bartholomaeus & Strelan, 2019 ;

A lot of the early work seemed to suggest that those who believed the world was essentially a just place were both naïve and bad because, in order to sustain their BJW, they derogated “innocent victims”. Still today this expanding and voluminous literature seems to focus on the “evil and naïve consequences” of a BJW. Thus, it is argued, it is patently obvious, the world is not just and people who believe it is are deluded and often victim-blamers in their attempt to justify their naïve beliefs.

In an early paper, I made some distinction between those who felt the world was just (people got what they deserved), unjust (the good and virtuous were punished) and the a-just or random world where just deeds were randomly rewarded and punished. We also distinguished between three other worlds: the personal, interpersonal and social world (Furnham & Procter, 1992 ). I thought the early work and early measure too simple, “scatter-gun”, and naïve. It seemed to me that people could believe in different worlds for different reasons. I might believe the political and economic world unjust; but the world of personal relations just. But most of all, I personally felt the world was a-just. It rains on the just and unjust alike (Matthew 5). However, some would argue that what is, is not necessarily what it could be, that is made fairer.

But much more importantly, I felt it was personally much more disadvantageous to believe the world was unjust as opposed to just. Imagine believing good actions were punished as opposed to rewarded: good people are assassinated, while dictators live to an old age. A major development at the turn of the millennium was to view the BJW as a healthy coping mechanism rather than being the manifestation of anti-social beliefs and prejudice (Dalbert, 2001 ; Furnham, 2003 ). There was a subtle movement from focusing on victim derogation to positive coping. Studies have portrayed BJW beliefs as a personal resource or coping strategy, which buffers against stress and enhances achievement behaviour. Of course, as pointed out above one could believe in a just personal world, an a-just interpersonal world and an unjust political world at the same time. Further, there must be degrees in which the world is just or unjust: not simply a stark binary option.

For the first time, BJW beliefs were seen as an indicator of mental health and planning. This does not contradict the more extensive literature on BJW and victim derogation. Rather it helps explain why people are so eager to maintain their beliefs which may be their major coping strategy. BJW is clearly functional for the individual. Rather than despise people for believing the world is (relatively) just, which certainly we teach our children, the BJW may be seen as a fundamental, cognitive coping strategy. However, the directionality is not always clear: Do mentally healthy people believe the world is just, or do just world believers deal better with the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. Or indeed is there actually a reciprocal causal relationship. Believing the world is just when it is not may be a maladaptive bruising experience.

One question is how BJW is related to other coping strategies and which are favoured by healthy individuals who have low BJW beliefs. Again, the focus is on how BJW relate to personal experiences rather than that of others. I believe from personal experience that “what goes around, comes around”, that for the most part good deeds are rewarded and vice versa. That—the bad are punished and the good rewarded—is what we teach our children, though we no doubt all believe this simple observation needs to be caveated and explained (Baier et al., 2013 ).

Two Neglected Areas

I have a very wide range of research interest and believe, as noted above SJ researchers have become rather narrow. Two such areas illustrate my point.

The Problem of Evil (Theodicy)

Theodicy is an explanatory concept, and term used by scholars, to illustrate the ways in which people try to find meaning in injustice and the suffering that results. Why does God allows evil things to occur (Blumenthal, 1993 ; Chester, 1998 ; Parro, 2021 ; Tinker, 2009 ). It is also known as the “Problem of Evil”, (PoE), which is most relevant to those who believe in an omnipotent, omniscient and omni-present deity and attempting to reconcile the observation that “bad things happen to good people” (Furnham & Brown, 1992 ). Furnham and Robinson ( 2023 ) some have talked about the problem s of evil, sceptical theism and the like (Church et al., 2021 ). It is all about injustice in the world.

The PoE is an enormous problem for believers in a Just God: one of peace, love and justice. Why does he allow injustice in the world?

Some suggest that suffering from various forms of injustice, including social justice, can be mitigated or partly overcome by understanding why an individual found themselves in a particular negative situation. Theologians have distinguished between moral evil, caused by human agency, and various natural evils.

Clearly, mono-theistic and pan-theistic religions favour predominantly different solutions and explanations though some, like the doctrine of karma (behaviour in a previous life), are specific to particular religions. Why this is an interesting and neglected literature is because it examines how people “deal with” obvious, inexplicable and outrageous injustice in the world. How and why does a loving, all-powerful God allow such cruelty and injustice to occur? Indeed is injustice sent by God to test us?

I wonder how many SJ researchers are believers and how they have resolved the problem?

Indifference to, and Coping with, Social Injustice: Stoicism

Given that we are all, at some time another “victims” of injustice, what is the best way we can cope with it. Is it better to attempt to ignore or downplay the issue or confront it? Life is not fair: get used to it.

The denial and suppression of emotion is at the heart of the modern, and ancient, concept of stoicism and fortitude. It has been associated with many different religions and investigated as a potentially adaptive coping style (Pathak et al., 2017 ).

The stoics believed that being indifferent to pain and pleasure and exercising emotional self-control were the best routes to happiness. Stoicism as a philosophy and a coping style has not appeared directly in psychology, though similar ideas have appeared like repression, suppression, detachment, fortitude and toxic-avoidant coping. Furthermore, whilst the classic interpretation of stoicism is as a healthy and desirable worldview and coping mechanism, the related psychological concepts have nearly always been seen as being maladaptive (Moore et al, 2013 ). It has also been dismissed as a pathological, masculine, “Big boys don’t cry” maladaptive coping mechanism, related to many poor health outcomes.

The concept of stoicism is not dissimilar to that of repression, although the former seems overall more a functional—and the latter a more dysfunctional—coping strategy. More importantly, stoicism involves the suppression of both pleasure and suffering, whereas repression seems more concerned with the repression of only negative emotions. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether stoicism as a coping strategy is psychologically adaptive or maladaptive. Repression is often confused with suppression, another type of defence mechanism. Whereas repression involves unconsciously blocking unwanted thoughts or impulses, suppression is conscious and voluntary, i.e. suppression represents a deliberate attempt to forget or not think about painful or unwanted thoughts.

So, my idea is that Social Justice researchers have neglected the clinical literature on personal and effective ways in which people attempt to deal with injustice (Pargament, 2011 ).

Advice to Young Scholars

There will never be a shortage of areas in which to explore concepts of justice. Current concerns include climate change, sex roles, retribution from slavery, the new world of work, etc. It would not be difficult to apply theories and measures to these areas and establish one’s academic research reputation. In doing so, new “topic-specific” measures may be constructed, new mini-theories developed and the field both consolidated and expanded. Plus, the world could actually be changed.

I have three worries and advice for young scholars who choose to take this path:

First, that the social justice literature gets too cut off from the mainstream. Researchers publish in specialist journals and go to specialist conferences. As noted above, social justice touches many disciplines and it is important to “keep up” with changes in the field. Do SJ researchers take into consideration changes in evolutionary psychology, neuro-psychology and cyber-psychology to make sure they are “with the project”? I think for too long evolutionary perspectives have been ignored. It is never good turn inward, particularly with such an interesting, important and multidimensional research agenda. Specialism is often, paradoxically, the enemy of progress.

Second, that the ideology of researchers too frequently permeates their research. It was R. S. Peters who observed that “ patient passive presuppositionless enquiry is a methodological myth ”. Are too many researchers coming to the research with a particular set of biases? Too eager perhaps to see injustice; too eager to “right-wrongs”; too angry to be sufficiently disinterested? It seems that most researchers in this area share a number of socio-political assumptions which means they are not confronted sufficiently to defend them. Politically left-wing, easily offended, depression-prone? An obsession with injustice and super-justice-sensitivity and a deep desire to right-wrongs is unlikely to lead to personal happiness or fulfillment? Perhaps, as noted above, it is often socio-political concerns that get people into the field.

Third, that the “objects/issues” of injustice become too wide. As noted about the theodicy literature suggests that there are three “grand attributions” for evil/injustice/unfairness: the will of (a) God; bad luck/chance/fate; and (deliberate) human actions. The ever growing and passionate debate about climate change illustrates this point well. To what extent is global warming a natural occurring phenomenon and what due to human behaviour: or is that climate denial. Do too many justice researchers want to see the causes of bad things in human behaviour because they can be changed. “Life is not fair: Do something about it”.

So, to briefly answer the questions I was asked

“What do you think about the current state of social justice scholarship?

I am not sure it has progressed a great deal over the last decade: Are there new theories, methods, insights? Can neuro-science help? I am not sure and wish the field the best.

Where do you think it is, and should be heading? Is it going in the right direction?

I think SJ researchers should integrate themselves more in the mainstream. I have made the point about being inward looking. There are imaginative evolutionary theories of justice and I wonder what neuro-science has to offer as well as devising new, non-self-report measures of SJ.

What advice would you give a young justice scholar? What would you like the current generation of young justice scholars to spend their time and talents on?”

SJ research is multi-disciplinary which is often a serious challenge as the different disciplines have very different research priorities. If I were a young scholar, I think I would have three interests: first, individual differences in conceiving of, and reacting to justice and injustice and devising new measures of those differences; second, looking at cross-cultural differences in the understanding of SJ particularly in ideas about the cause, and repair of injustice; third, studying those social groups who are often extremists and who are concerned about very specific areas of injustice like climate change, sex roles and wealth distribution.

Too much research on social justice is about social in justice. It is too easy for scholars to become somewhat myopic because of their specialism. New journals and societies are founded to cater for this and often those who join and publish spend too much time talking to each other. People appear to be attracted to the area particularly because of their own values and beliefs. This is called ASA theory: Attraction-Selection-Attrition. Indeed, some see their research as a personal quest and may as a consequence become insufficiently disinterested to do good research.

Life is not fair. Perhaps researchers should concentrate more on helping people accept this self-evident truth? As St Francis has been reputed to say “Lord, grant me the strength to change the things I can, the serenity to deal with the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference”? Or, as one of my “critical friends” preferred to conclude: So we can and should change what can be changed, which is much of what happens and will.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Kjell Törnblom and Ali Kazemi for the invitation to write this paper and to Manfred Schmitt, Stuart Carr, Michael Bond, Elisabeth Kals and Nick Emler for comments on earlier drafts.

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Furnham, A. Life is not Fair: Get Used to It! A Personal Perspective on Contemporary Social Justice Research. Soc Just Res 36 , 293–304 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-023-00417-7

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Jamelle Bouie

The Supreme Court Is Playing a Dangerous Game

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

If the chief currency of the Supreme Court is its legitimacy as an institution, then you can say with confidence that its account is as close to empty as it has been for a very long time.

Since the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization nearly two years ago, its general approval with the public has taken a plunge. As recently as the last presidential election year, according to the Pew Research Center , 70 percent of Americans said they had a favorable view of the court. In the wake of Dobbs, that number dipped to 44 percent. Twenty-four percent of Democrats, according to Pew, said they approved of the Supreme Court.

In the latest 538 average , just over 52 percent of Americans disapproved of the Supreme Court, and around 40 percent approved.

Does the court know about its precipitous decline with much of the public? It’s hard to say. It’s easier to answer a related question: Does it care? If the recent actions of the conservative majority are any indication, the answer is no.

Over the past month, members of that majority have effectively rewritten the 14th Amendment to functionally shield Donald Trump from the constitutional consequences of his actions leading up to and on Jan. 6. They have taken up the former president’s tendentious argument that he is immune to criminal prosecution for all actions taken while in office — postponing a trial and potentially denying the public the right to know, before we go to the polls in November, whether he is a criminal in the eyes of the law.

Most recently, the court allowed the State of Texas, governed by a cadre of some of the most reactionary conservatives in the country, to carry out its own immigration policy in contravention of both federal officials and the general precedent that it’s the national government that handles the national border, not the states.

It is enough to make teachers and practitioners of constitutional law wonder, as my colleague Jesse Wegman noted last month , whether there’s any reason to play the table as though it were still on the level — to continue to treat the court as if it were anything other than a partisan political institution.

Here I want to raise an additional point. It’s not just the recent actions of the Supreme Court — including the corrupt conduct of some of its members — that jeopardize its legitimacy and political standing but also the circumstances under which this particular court majority came into being.

There is no way to look past the fact that five of the six members of the conservative majority on the Roberts court were nominated by presidents who entered office without the winds of a popular majority. John Roberts and Samuel Alito, the author of Dobbs, were placed on the court by George W. Bush, who entered office short of a popular vote win and on the strength of a contested Electoral College victory. The other three — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — were nominated by Trump, who lost the national popular vote by more than two million ballots in 2016.

The three Trump justices bring additional baggage. Each one was nominated and confirmed in a show of partisan power politics. Gorsuch was the direct beneficiary of Senator Mitch McConnell’s blockade of the seat held by Justice Antonin Scalia, who died early in 2016. Republicans, led by McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, refused to give President Barack Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was the first time the Senate had simply ignored a president’s nominee for the Supreme Court.

Kavanaugh was confirmed by a narrow vote of 50 to 48 (with one abstention and one absence) in the face of a credible accusation of sexual assault. Barrett was confirmed in flagrant violation of McConnell’s own rule for Supreme Court nominations. To block Garland, McConnell said that it was too close to an election to move forward; to confirm Barrett, McConnell said that it was too close to an election to wait.

There is no question that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs was the catalyst for its poor standing with the public. But the Dobbs majority owes itself to a garish Republican partisanship that almost certainly worked to weaken the political ground on which it stood in relation to the American people.

At the risk of sounding a little dramatic, you can draw a useful comparison between the Supreme Court’s current political position and the one it held on the eve of the 1860 presidential election.

It was not just the ruling itself that drove the ferocious opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which overturned the Missouri Compromise and wrote Black Americans out of the national community; it was the political entanglement of the Taney court with the slaveholding interests of the antebellum Democratic Party.

Six of the seven justices in the majority were Democratic appointments. The one who wasn’t, Samuel Nelson, was nominated by John Tyler, who was a Democrat before running on the Whig ticket with William Henry Harrison. Five of the justices were appointed by slave owners. At the time of the ruling, four of the justices were slave owners. And the chief justice, Roger Taney, was a strong Democratic partisan who was in close communication with James Buchanan, the incoming Democratic president, in the weeks before he issued the court’s ruling in 1857. Buchanan, in fact, had written to some of the justices urging them to issue a broad and comprehensive ruling that would settle the legal status of all Black Americans.

The Supreme Court, critics of the ruling said, was not trying to faithfully interpret the Constitution as much as it was acting on behalf of the so-called Slave Power, an alleged conspiracy of interests determined to take slavery national. The court, wrote a committee of the New York State Assembly in its report on the Dred Scott decision, was determined to “bring slavery within our borders, against our will, with all its unhallowed, demoralizing and blighted influences.”

The Supreme Court did not have the political legitimacy to issue a ruling as broad and potentially far-reaching as Dred Scott, and the result was to mobilize a large segment of the public against the court. Abraham Lincoln spoke for many in his first inaugural address when he took aim at the pretense of the Taney court to decide for the nation: “The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”

As much as ours is a dire moment for the future of the American republic, we can at least rest assured that we aren’t living through 1857 or 1860 or 1861. Santayana notwithstanding, history does not actually repeat itself. But this Supreme Court — the Roberts court — is playing its own version of the dangerous game that brought the Taney court to ruin. It is acting as if the public must obey its dictates. It is acting as if its legitimacy is incidental to its power. It is acting as if it cannot be touched or brought to heel.

The Supreme Court is making a bet, in other words, that it is truly unaccountable.

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I used to love men like men love women — that is, not very well, and with a hunger driven only by my own inadequacies. Not him. In those early days, I spoke fondly of my family, stocked the fridge with his favorite pasta, folded his clothes more neatly than I ever have since. I wrote his mother a thank-you note for hosting me in his native France, something befitting a daughter-in-law. It worked; I meant it. After graduation and my fellowship at Oxford, I stayed in Europe for his career and married him at 23.

Of course I just fell in love. Romances have a setting; I had only intervened to place myself well. Mainly, I spotted the precise trouble of being a woman ahead of time, tried to surf it instead of letting it drown me on principle. I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal , and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.

The reception of a particular age-gap relationship depends on its obviousness. The greater and more visible the difference in years and status between a man and a woman, the more it strikes others as transactional. Transactional thinking in relationships is both as American as it gets and the least kosher subject in the American romantic lexicon. When a 50-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman walk down the street, the questions form themselves inside of you; they make you feel cynical and obscene: How good of a deal is that? Which party is getting the better one? Would I take it? He is older. Income rises with age, so we assume he has money, at least relative to her; at minimum, more connections and experience. She has supple skin. Energy. Sex. Maybe she gets a Birkin. Maybe he gets a baby long after his prime. The sight of their entwined hands throws a lucid light on the calculations each of us makes, in love, to varying degrees of denial. You could get married in the most romantic place in the world, like I did, and you would still have to sign a contract.

Twenty and 30 is not like 30 and 40; some freshness to my features back then, some clumsiness in my bearing, warped our decade, in the eyes of others, to an uncrossable gulf. Perhaps this explains the anger we felt directed at us at the start of our relationship. People seemed to take us very, very personally. I recall a hellish car ride with a friend of his who began to castigate me in the backseat, in tones so low that only I could hear him. He told me, You wanted a rich boyfriend. You chased and snuck into parties . He spared me the insult of gold digger, but he drew, with other words, the outline for it. Most offended were the single older women, my husband’s classmates. They discussed me in the bathroom at parties when I was in the stall. What does he see in her? What do they talk about? They were concerned about me. They wielded their concern like a bludgeon. They paraphrased without meaning to my favorite line from Nabokov’s Lolita : “You took advantage of my disadvantage,” suspecting me of some weakness he in turn mined. It did not disturb them, so much, to consider that all relationships were trades. The trouble was the trade I’d made struck them as a bad one.

The truth is you can fall in love with someone for all sorts of reasons, tiny transactions, pluses and minuses, whose sum is your affection for each other, your loyalty, your commitment. The way someone picks up your favorite croissant. Their habit of listening hard. What they do for you on your anniversary and your reciprocal gesture, wrapped thoughtfully. The serenity they inspire; your happiness, enlivening it. When someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them.

When I think of same-age, same-stage relationships, what I tend to picture is a woman who is doing too much for too little.

I’m 27 now, and most women my age have “partners.” These days, girls become partners quite young. A partner is supposed to be a modern answer to the oppression of marriage, the terrible feeling of someone looming over you, head of a household to which you can only ever be the neck. Necks are vulnerable. The problem with a partner, however, is if you’re equal in all things, you compromise in all things. And men are too skilled at taking .

There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. A boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. She “likes to do it for him.” A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. Hauling him at her own expense.

I find a post on Reddit where five thousand men try to define “ a woman’s touch .” They describe raised flower beds, blankets, photographs of their loved ones, not hers, sprouting on the mantel overnight. Candles, coasters, side tables. Someone remembering to take lint out of the dryer. To give compliments. I wonder what these women are getting back. I imagine them like Cinderella’s mice, scurrying around, their sole proof of life their contributions to a more central character. On occasion I meet a nice couple, who grew up together. They know each other with a fraternalism tender and alien to me.  But I think of all my friends who failed at this, were failed at this, and I think, No, absolutely not, too risky . Riskier, sometimes, than an age gap.

My younger brother is in his early 20s, handsome, successful, but in many ways: an endearing disaster. By his age, I had long since wisened up. He leaves his clothes in the dryer, takes out a single shirt, steams it for three minutes. His towel on the floor, for someone else to retrieve. His lovely, same-age girlfriend is aching to fix these tendencies, among others. She is capable beyond words. Statistically, they will not end up together. He moved into his first place recently, and she, the girlfriend, supplied him with a long, detailed list of things he needed for his apartment: sheets, towels, hangers, a colander, which made me laugh. She picked out his couch. I will bet you anything she will fix his laundry habits, and if so, they will impress the next girl. If they break up, she will never see that couch again, and he will forget its story. I tell her when I visit because I like her, though I get in trouble for it: You shouldn’t do so much for him, not for someone who is not stuck with you, not for any boy, not even for my wonderful brother.

Too much work had left my husband, by 30, jaded and uninspired. He’d burned out — but I could reenchant things. I danced at restaurants when they played a song I liked. I turned grocery shopping into an adventure, pleased by what I provided. Ambitious, hungry, he needed someone smart enough to sustain his interest, but flexible enough in her habits to build them around his hours. I could. I do: read myself occupied, make myself free, materialize beside him when he calls for me. In exchange, I left a lucrative but deadening spreadsheet job to write full-time, without having to live like a writer. I learned to cook, a little, and decorate, somewhat poorly. Mostly I get to read, to walk central London and Miami and think in delicious circles, to work hard, when necessary, for free, and write stories for far less than minimum wage when I tally all the hours I take to write them.

At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self, couldn’t imagine doing it in tandem with someone, two raw lumps of clay trying to mold one another and only sullying things worse. I’d go on dates with boys my age and leave with the impression they were telling me not about themselves but some person who didn’t exist yet and on whom I was meant to bet regardless. My husband struck me instead as so finished, formed. Analyzable for compatibility. He bore the traces of other women who’d improved him, small but crucial basics like use a coaster ; listen, don’t give advice. Young egos mellow into patience and generosity.

My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did. Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on. I moved into his flat, onto his level, drag and drop, cleaner thrice a week, bills automatic. By opting out of partnership in my 20s, I granted myself a kind of compartmentalized, liberating selfishness none of my friends have managed. I am the work in progress, the party we worry about, a surprising dominance. When I searched for my first job, at 21, we combined our efforts, for my sake. He had wisdom to impart, contacts with whom he arranged coffees; we spent an afternoon, laughing, drawing up earnest lists of my pros and cons (highly sociable; sloppy math). Meanwhile, I took calls from a dear friend who had a boyfriend her age. Both savagely ambitious, hyperclose and entwined in each other’s projects. If each was a start-up , the other was the first hire, an intense dedication I found riveting. Yet every time she called me, I hung up with the distinct feeling that too much was happening at the same time: both learning to please a boss; to forge more adult relationships with their families; to pay bills and taxes and hang prints on the wall. Neither had any advice to give and certainly no stability. I pictured a three-legged race, two people tied together and hobbling toward every milestone.

I don’t fool myself. My marriage has its cons. There are only so many times one can say “thank you” — for splendid scenes, fine dinners — before the phrase starts to grate. I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that shapes the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him. He doesn’t have to hold it over my head. It just floats there, complicating usual shorthands to explain dissatisfaction like, You aren’t being supportive lately . It’s a Frenchism to say, “Take a decision,” and from time to time I joke: from whom? Occasionally I find myself in some fabulous country at some fabulous party and I think what a long way I have traveled, like a lucky cloud, and it is frightening to think of oneself as vapor.

Mostly I worry that if he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive, but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials, the way Renaissance painters hid in their paintings their faces among a crowd. I wonder if when they looked at their paintings, they saw their own faces first. But this is the wrong question, if our aim is happiness. Like the other question on which I’m expected to dwell: Who is in charge, the man who drives or the woman who put him there so she could enjoy herself? I sit in the car, in the painting it would have taken me a corporate job and 20 years to paint alone, and my concern over who has the upper hand becomes as distant as the horizon, the one he and I made so wide for me.

To be a woman is to race against the clock, in several ways, until there is nothing left to be but run ragged.

We try to put it off, but it will hit us at some point: that we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone. A woman at 20 rarely has to earn her welcome; a boy at 20 will be turned away at the door. A woman at 30 may find a younger woman has taken her seat; a man at 30 will have invited her. I think back to the women in the bathroom, my husband’s classmates. What was my relationship if not an inconvertible sign of this unfairness? What was I doing, in marrying older, if not endorsing it? I had taken advantage of their disadvantage. I had preempted my own. After all, principled women are meant to defy unfairness, to show some integrity or denial, not plan around it, like I had. These were driven women, successful, beautiful, capable. I merely possessed the one thing they had already lost. In getting ahead of the problem, had I pushed them down? If I hadn’t, would it really have made any difference?

When we decided we wanted to be equal to men, we got on men’s time. We worked when they worked, retired when they retired, had to squeeze pregnancy, children, menopause somewhere impossibly in the margins. I have a friend, in her late 20s, who wears a mood ring; these days it is often red, flickering in the air like a siren when she explains her predicament to me. She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one. The same-age partner, equally unsettled in his career, will take only the minimum time off, she guesses, or else pay some cost which will come back to bite her. Everything unfailingly does. If she freezes her eggs to buy time, the decision and its logistics will burden her singly — and perhaps it will not work. Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty? There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan. It’s not that our efforts to have it all were fated for failure. They simply weren’t imaginative enough.

For me, my relationship, with its age gap, has alleviated this rush , permitted me to massage the clock, shift its hands to my benefit. Very soon, we will decide to have children, and I don’t panic over last gasps of fun, because I took so many big breaths of it early: on the holidays of someone who had worked a decade longer than I had, in beautiful places when I was young and beautiful, a symmetry I recommend. If such a thing as maternal energy exists, mine was never depleted. I spent the last nearly seven years supported more than I support and I am still not as old as my husband was when he met me. When I have a child, I will expect more help from him than I would if he were younger, for what does professional tenure earn you if not the right to set more limits on work demands — or, if not, to secure some child care, at the very least? When I return to work after maternal upheaval, he will aid me, as he’s always had, with his ability to put himself aside, as younger men are rarely able.

Above all, the great gift of my marriage is flexibility. A chance to live my life before I become responsible for someone else’s — a lover’s, or a child’s. A chance to write. A chance at a destiny that doesn’t adhere rigidly to the routines and timelines of men, but lends itself instead to roomy accommodation, to the very fluidity Betty Friedan dreamed of in 1963 in The Feminine Mystique , but we’ve largely forgotten: some career or style of life that “permits year-to-year variation — a full-time paid job in one community, part-time in another, exercise of the professional skill in serious volunteer work or a period of study during pregnancy or early motherhood when a full-time job is not feasible.” Some things are just not feasible in our current structures. Somewhere along the way we stopped admitting that, and all we did was make women feel like personal failures. I dream of new structures, a world in which women have entry-level jobs in their 30s; alternate avenues for promotion; corporate ladders with balconies on which they can stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby, enjoy themselves, before they keep climbing. Perhaps men long for this in their own way. Actually I am sure of that.

Once, when we first fell in love, I put my head in his lap on a long car ride; I remember his hands on my face, the sun, the twisting turns of a mountain road, surprising and not surprising us like our romance, and his voice, telling me that it was his biggest regret that I was so young, he feared he would lose me. Last week, we looked back at old photos and agreed we’d given each other our respective best years. Sometimes real equality is not so obvious, sometimes it takes turns, sometimes it takes almost a decade to reveal itself.

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How Nicole Shanahan rose through tech and law to RFK Jr.'s ticket

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has found an unlikely — but like-minded — running mate for his independent presidential ticket . 

Tech lawyer Nicole Shanahan has no government experience and no national profile, and she is one of the most unusual selections for a high-profile running mate in recent memory. She is far less known than some of the other names Kennedy considered, including NFL star Aaron Rodgers and actor and former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura. 

But what she does offer is a similar worldview to Kennedy's, presumed loyalty to the person who plucked her from relative obscurity and — perhaps most important — enormous wealth that the Kennedy-Shanahan campaign could tap far in excess of contribution limits that would apply to donors who are not themselves candidates.

Shanahan, 38, also offers a youth and vitality that Kennedy often says is necessary in politics. And she has already demonstrated her commitment to Kennedy’s cause, revealing in February that she donated $4 million to a pro-Kennedy super PAC to help pay for a Super Bowl ad .

Despite mostly supporting progressive and center-left Democrats in the past, Shanahan has said that she was motivated to support Kennedy in part because of concerns about children’s health and the environment, including vaccines, and she has also expressed opposition to the research money that has poured into the in-vitro fertilization industry.

She defended Kennedy’s advocacy against vaccines to Newsweek this year, saying that “being called an anti-vaxxer is so unfair” and that “we need to have a safe space” to discuss the issue.

A life in the world's tech capital

Shanahan, a tech lawyer and entrepreneur turned philanthropist from Oakland, California, has lived a life that has intersected with some of the most important technologies and business titans in Silicon Valley.

Shanahan, born to parents who struggled financially, said that her family was on food stamps and that she started working at age 12 to help make ends meet. 

“My dad was diagnosed with bipolar schizophrenia when I was 9, and my Chinese-born mom had only been in the United States for two years when I was born,” she told San Francisco magazine for a profile in 2021. “So not only was there no money, there was almost no parental guidance, and as you can imagine with a mentally ill father, there was lots of chaos and fear.”

She credits the internet with helping her escape, and technology would come to dominate her life after she graduated from the University of Puget Sound and returned to the Bay Area, attending Santa Clara University School of Law and then diving into the intersection of the legal and tech worlds.

In a landscape where innovation often outpaces regulation, she founded ClearAccessIP, a company that uses artificial intelligence technology to help patent holders manage their intellectual property, according to its website. The company was acquired by IPwe in 2020.

Shanahan married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2018 and divorced him in 2022. That year, The Wall Street Journal reported that she had an affair with billionaire Elon Musk, but both Shanahan and Musk have denied the accusation. The Journal has stood by its reporting.

“The WSJ’s narrative that an affair with Elon Musk led to the end of my marriage was about as accurate as claiming that the body heat of polar bears is responsible for the melting of the Arctic ice caps,” she wrote last year in a first-person essay for People. “It felt senseless and cruel.”

After the divorce from Brin, who is worth an estimated $121 billion, according to Forbes, she transitioned to full-time philanthropy work. 

Shanahan’s charity, the Bia-Echo Foundation , says its mission is to “create a multiplying effect” on issues Shanahan cares about, including “reproductive longevity & equality, criminal justice reform and a healthy & livable planet.”

She started that work through her ex-husband’s foundation, announcing a $100 million commitment in 2019 to programs aimed at helping women become pregnant later in life, in addition to exploring solutions to criminal justice reform and climate change. 

Fertility issues have been a focus of her foundation and her investment firm, Planeta Ventures, and a later gift of $6 million helped create the Center for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality; she said her goal is to help women be able to have children into their mid-50s .

However, Shanahan has advocated against supporting IVF research, because, in her view, it detracts from understanding the root causes of infertility. And she has argued the procedure is “ sold irresponsibly ” and has become more of a “commercial endeavor” than a scientific one, calling its promise “one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today.”

“Many of the IVF clinics are financially incentivized to offer you egg freezing and IVF and not incentivized to offer you other fertility services,” Shanahan told The New Yorker last year.

“I’m so often told that IVF is this great technology, and I always get questioned why I’m not more supportive of IVF,” she said in an online video series . “I’ve tried to imagine where we would be as a field if all of the money that has been invested in IVF and all of the money that’s been invested into marketing IVF and all of the government money that has been invested in subsidizing IVF, if just 10% of that went into reproductive longevity, research and fundamental research.”

That view could be especially relevant this year as both parties debate abortion rights after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. An Alabama Supreme Court ruling this year that frozen embryos created for IVF were people briefly halted procedures in the state — and made the issue a national political hot button.

Politicians from both parties rushed to voice their support for IVF, and Democrats argued that longtime GOP positioning on abortion legislation and “personhood” laws would have the effect of restricting IVF.

Her position on vaccines and other past advocacy

Shanahan’s 2023 essay also reveals how her experience with the reporting around her marriage led her to adopt a more jaundiced view of the news media, which is a frequent target of Kennedy’s.

“They displayed a reckless thirst for a popular hit piece, no matter the cost it would have on my life,” she wrote.

She and Brin had a daughter, Echo, who was diagnosed with autism at a young age. Shanahan has said she is committed to investing her wealth in understanding the causes and treatments of the disorder.

Many vaccine skeptics, including Kennedy, have said vaccines cause autism — even though experts say there is no evidence supporting the claim and the key research papers that made the link were later retracted , with their lead author widely discredited after he was found to have manipulated his data .

Kennedy took a leave from his post as the leader of the country’s best-funded anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, to run for president, and he has since included a number of anti-vaccine activists in his campaign. 

Last summer, Shanahan “ committed ” to her partner, Jacob Strumwasser, an executive of a company working on “next-generation of bitcoin financial software,” whom she met at Burning Man.

“We were living parallel surfing lives,” she told People last year, “and then we met at Burning Man, which is the driest place on the planet.”

Kennedy kicked off his campaign with a speech at a Bitcoin convention in Miami, which was his first public appearance as a candidate. And he has spoken often about the promise of cryptocurrency. 

Politically, Shanahan has donated heavily to Democrats and progressive causes, such as criminal justice reform ballot measures, according to campaign finance records. 

In 2020, she gave $2,800 to Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and co-hosted a fundraiser for Buttigieg, who is the transportation secretary. She also gave $2,800 to Democratic contender Marianne Williamson during the last election cycle, before she donated $25,000 to the fundraising efforts backing Joe Biden. She also gave the maximum $6,600 to Kennedy’s campaign last year, before she announced the larger gift to the super PAC for the Super Bowl ads.

Shanahan also gave to several Democratic congressional candidates in battleground districts in 2018. And she gave the maximum $5,400 contribution to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016.

Asked in 2022 about her politics, she told Puck: “I don’t think about it in terms of party. I think about it in terms of people, places and ideas.” That attitude reflects Kennedy’s own rhetoric, especially since he left the Democratic presidential primary campaign to run as an independent. 

While there is no obvious precedent for vice presidential candidates bankrolling their campaigns, Federal Election Commission rules exempt candidates funding their own campaigns from contribution limits, so it appears she would be able to contribute or lend as much money as she wants to the Kennedy campaign. 

The campaign needs money to fund its ballot access work, including the painstaking and expensive work of gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures from dozens of states. 

While major-party candidates typically wait until the summer to announce their running mates, one reason Kennedy did so now is because deadlines are coming up in some states that require submission of both names on tickets to get on ballots.

Alex Seitz-Wald is a senior politics reporter for NBC News.