No matter where you’re born, life can be unfair.
Certain things stand out more than others. The point of analyzing what’s unfair about life is to make you appreciate what you do have, more.
You’re less likely to walk around with a bazooka full of anger on your shoulder aimed at innocent victims when you appreciate your life is fairer than most.
If any of these cause aha-moments then I’ve succeeded.
The pain of uncommon natural disasters
In 1997, here in Australia, a natural disaster captivated hearts and minds for weeks. 3500 tonnes of rock and mud slid down a mountain where a small ski resort stood.
Two ski lodges got taken out by the landslide.
A young man named Stuart Diver miraculously stayed alive under the ruble while 18 others died instantly. In sub-zero temperature for more than 65 hours, he survived with nothing more than a blanket and snow jacket.
His wife wasn’t so lucky and died in the tragedy.
Bizarrely, Stuart didn’t abandon the scene of the accident. Still to this day he lives in the same small village in Thredbo. Once he got over his deceased wife he remarried again.
A stroke of bad luck led his second wife to be taken too soon. He nursed her at home while she fought breast cancer and eventually lost.
Nature can be unfair. It picks its victims randomly.
The relentlessness of coroni-rona
Lisa Finnegan loved her 84 year old father very much.
On January 26th 2021 he was booked in for his coroni jab in the arm. When the 22nd rolled around, he told her he had a cold. Lisa’s sister became suspicious and asked him to get a coroni-rona test.
It came back positive.
On the 6th of February the family had a Zoom call with him to see how he was doing. The intention was to temporarily say goodbye to him while he spent some time in ICU with coroni.
This was the last time they got to see him.
He died from coroni on Valentine’s Day 2021.
Lisa still hasn’t been able to accept that if her father got his jab in the arm a few days sooner, he might have got coroni and survived like millions of others. The last time she saw her father in person was Thanksgiving 2018.
The famous phrase “I always thought that I’d see you again” falsely made her believe she didn’t need to rush to go see him.
See the people you love more often than you believe you should. They could leave this world earlier than you think and it’ll cause painful regrets.
Capturing a moment accidentally with a photo
Many of us walk around happily taking pictures of everything.
I know I’m guilty.
On February 21st 1970, a teenager named Keith ran away from home to avoid going to catholic school. He arrived at Sydney airport and found his way onto the tarmac.
He then crept up into the wheel arch of a plane about to take off. Like all planes, once in the sky, the wheel arch he was hiding in opened up so the wheels could retract.
It’s at this moment he fell from the sky and splattered all over the airport tarmac. Onlookers described the sight of his mangled body as gruesome.
Novice photographer John Gilpin was out taking random photos on the same day as the accident. He took photos of planes taking off. As a man that didn’t watch the news, he had no idea about the young boy’s death.
Only when he sat down to develop his photos did he realize he’d caught the whole incident of the boy falling from the sky on camera.
The photo has become one of the most famous in history.
Image Credit-JohnGilpin via Reddit
It’s unfair a camera captured such a sad moment. Death is best left to the imagination of those who dare to think of it, not the sharp lens of a high-definition camera.
The hidden tax so many people pay
The fallout from the coroni disaster has begun.
The most noticeable change is high inflation. This is where the value of money decreases sharply. Right now that decrease in value is 8.3% yearly.
Thanks to a complex financial system, many normal people aren’t aware of what inflation is or how it works. They mistakenly think their homes went up in value when a lot of the change is the result of inflation.
Money created out of nowhere floods the financial system and artificially boosts the price of everything. Trying to understand the true cost of pretty much anything becomes hard (price discovery).
Rich people who own assets get richer when inflation goes up. Poor people with no assets get poorer from higher inflation.
It’s not all bad news.
Parts of America are already adopting mandatory financial education in schools. Let’s hope the unfair nature of inflation starts to become widespread knowledge. Only then will we see a change to the Wall Street madness.
Selling an investment too early
We’ve all got stories of this.
Vaughn Mancha bought $10,000 of Netflix stock when all they did was sell DVDs to Blockbuster haters. If he’d sold his investment in 2021 it would have been worth $500,000
Instead, like a schmuck, he sold all of it for a measly $64,000 way back.
All because his broker said “take profits Vaughn.” Now he looks after his own affairs. Six years ago he yolo’d into Apple stock with his wife’s retirement fund. He says she is now much richer than him.
The answer to most of his wife’s questions now is “yes dear.”
We’ve all sold an investment too early because we got bad advice.
The Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos investment scam
Billionaires can be a generous bunch.
On July 15th 2020, 130 high-profile Twitter accounts simultaneously turned into humanity’s savior.
It was the deal of a lifetime.
Send $1000 to Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Apple’s Bitcoin wallet … and they’ll send you back $2000.
Bezos was a bit of a tight arse and capped his charitable act at $50M. All tweets with this killer deal came from the official Twitter accounts of many famous people.
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- Screenshots of tweets via Reddit
Turns out the deal was a hoax. Criminals had managed to get access to Twitter’s administrative tools. The total amount of stolen funds taken off innocent people is unknown.
As my grandpa used to say: If it sounds too good to be true it probably is.
The lottery of birth
On the day we’re born a certain level of luck is or isn’t granted to us.
We can be born in a beautiful place like Miami beach. Or we can be born in the slums of a 3rd world country and risk starvation.
Our parents can be kind and nurturing, or they can be monsters that physically abuse us every day when we get home from school. I think about how unfair the lottery of birth is a lot.
I got lucky to be born in Australia. My daughter, who will be born later this year, is lucky to be joining a loving family that lives in a home with heating/cooling, comfortable beds, and even an electrically reclining couch!
The unfairness of birth is often forgotten. We assume it’s our right to be born where we are. But so many don’t get that choice.
They endure hardship every day because their birth lottery wasn’t as fair as another. Then there are the children who never get to be born. Who die in miscarriages or childbirth.
A work colleague experienced it. She buried her child that was born too soon in a mini-sized casket. When she returned to work she wasn’t doing so well emotionally. Then she found out her job was given to someone else during her absence and she’d have to jump back into the job market.
It didn’t break her, thankfully. No.
She became stronger. Now she’s unshakeable. I’d like to see anyone try and break her. She’d snap their arms with her tiny fingers if they tried to hurt her.
Life can be unfair. But you can even the odds a little too through courage.
