Do you deserve what you have? Do you feel you deserve what you've got?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I have more, and less, than I deserve in life.

Materially, I believe, I deserve much less than I have. I do not work for a living, due in part to mental/emotional issues and in part to family luck and generosity. I am well kept in clothes, food, and discretionary income, none of which I have any real right to. I was also blessed/burdened with above average intelligence which made certain tasks easier than most people could imagine (mostly writing and music, which don’t add up to much without a titanic work ethic and steely confidence, two things I lack). I am, in short, a slacker, with a massive karmic debt to pay.

Psychically, I believe, deserve much more than I have. Friendship and love were never more than fitful and stumbling episodes in my life. Any empathy or insight about others has had to make it past crippling self-obsession (can you tell???) and a sense of self-doubt that is so logical and resilient it’s almost iron-clad. So most of that empathy with others is lost on me. I find dealing with people in general to be treacherous. I wish I could connect in my life, but it hurts. It hurts in a way no one, I included, could ever reach. So I prefer loneliness, which is miserable, but predictable and takes less out of me.

22

I don’t know. Thanks to being born in a family that was living in a good neighborhood, had a culture of learning, and thanks to being born with a reasonably high level of intelligence, I’ve done well all my life doing things I enjoy, and now have more money than time. Do I deserve that? I also got born with a face and personality that meant I didn’t spend my single years sleeping with starlets. Did I deserve that?
My wife and I have never made foolish financial decisions - is that something we deserve credit for or a product of our very similar upbringing? We have two great kids. How much of that is from us and how much from the luck of the genetic draw? We know plenty of good people with problem kids.
I know we don’t deserve our good luck - accidents we walk away from, no major illnesses, no major disasters. I’m 58 and have spent only one night in a hospital my entire life, and have never been out of work. I think it is mostly luck.
I think this is why I’m now a liberal - I don’t consider myself better than anyone with less than I have, just a bit luckier. Being unlucky is no reason to suffer.

23

I deserver 100 times better than what I’ve got and I do not deserve this low level of life for all I’ve given.

But as my mother used to say “It’s better than a kick in the head.”

There’s no point crying over spilt milk, if you can’t change it, deal with it.

24

Compared to other countries, other eras in time, I am lucky. I am grateful for that and I acknowledge that.

But compared to my cultural peers? No, I don’t deserve my lot in life. I try to be thoughtful and considerate. I’m a hard worker, honest, and loyal. I don’t have much and I see people who are so awful who have do. And I don’t even mean just money and stuff, but non-tangible things that they take for granted and I would almost kill for.

25

Deserve? I dunno. Deserve is for someone else to decide, I take my talents and use them (or not). Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the best I can find as a promise, and that’s pretty open ended. What I have is debatable. I own a home. I’ve worked my way into the middle, middle class. I am free of want.

I know what I value, my family, my education, I’ve learned that my personal feeling of value lies in helping others.

26

I hit the jackpot as well, being born in NYC in the early 1960s. We were on welfare for a few years and food stamps for more years, but the public schools were very good at the time, and to make a long story short, I ended up getting a degree from Caltech. (This involved quite a bit of work on my part, BTW). Then I got a job that has been challenging, stressful and fairly rewarding, and 26 years later, I’m still here.

Just being born in NYC when I was born put me well ahead of nearly every human who has ever lived, and I benefited greatly from the social welfare system in place during my childhood and early adulthood. Add that I have no major genetic defects, no disabilities, have not been the victim of horrible crimes and live in a system that I believe is a functioning meritocracy, and I have absolutely nothing to complain about.

However, I’m also from one of those families that breaks the stereotype – even though we were poor, the household was always full of anger, resentment and violence, and I’ve had a rather bleak life from an emotional perspective. I continue to struggle with relationships, but progress is very slow. It never seriously occurred to me that I’d still be alive at my age.

27

I deserve what I have at least as much as, say, the Obamas or Al Gore deserve what they have.

28

I’ve had a lot more pain, both physical and emotional, than I think I deserve. This has been true almost throughout my life. I have often said: “Whatever I did in my last life, I hope I f’in well enjoyed it. . .”

If you are talking more about a straight “stuff” to effort ratio, I’d say I’ve earned what I have, and am fairly comfortable with the trade.

29

Everyone has pretty much answered what I would have said. This place is great that way.

Something I was thinking is that there seems to be an underlying assumption in the OP that effort leads to (or should lead to) reward in direct proportion. But if people are making busy work for themselves and making life harder than it needs to be to feel like they’re accomplishing something, they might be working hard and feeling like they deserve more when they’re really not doing anything except making themselves miserable. I don’t think it always follows that working hard leads to deserving, unless the working hard is seen as the end in itself. But then the deserving doesn’t come into play.

30

I’m sorry, but that’s nonsense. White does NOT = magic bullet (or two steps back from magic bullet) to success.

Some of us are born very near, or at the bottom of the ladder REGARDLESS of our color, or where we were born. Like a LOT of people, I barely clawed my way up from dirt poorness. It had NOTHING to do with having “the right” color, it had everything to do with working my ass off. To say otherwise is to invalidate people who do have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps (or brastraps :D).

31

I think what you’re ignoring is that in many, many places in the world no matter how hard you worked you wouldn’t have anything close to the life you have now. There are too many places in the world where opportunity to excel is just not a possibility. You won the lottery just by being born in a place where hard work can get you more than a dirt floor and food for today.

32

Furthermore, there are some very real advantages that come with being white.

To give one example- if you ever get it in your head to become an English teacher in Asia, you will have a massively easier time finding work. Schools are looking for a “typical foreigner” to impress parents with and are reluctant to hire African-Americans or Asian-Americans no matter how experienced and knowledgeable they are.

Okay, so that is one small specific thing that doesn’t apply to most people. Let’s look at something more universal- love.

According to the surprisingly fascinating OKCupid Blog, being white gives you a huge advantage in the world of dating. White women seek white men almost exclusively- as do Asian and Hispanic women. While black women are much more likely to write to men and send them replies, they are far less likely to get any replies back. Pretty much every ethnic group, including blacks, has an extremely low response rate for black women.

That’d be a bummer, huh?

33

I had to have it all, to lose it all, to have it all.

34

I’m afraid you misunderstood my point.

To keep the rest of this easier to read, I’m just going to talk about “Americans”. But the same thinking applies to people in other first world countries.

Being born an American of any gender or color puts you ahead of 95% of the world. If you don’t believe that, you’ve not spent enough time outside the USA.

Now within the 5% which are all the Americans, clearly being white, or male, doesn’t guarantee that you’re at the top of the heap. But it helps.

Just like on average men are larger than women, on average men earn more money. And so do whites over non-whites. Certainly there is a lot of overlap in the categorries. But if you plot the averages, that’s where they fall. the same differences apply to educational attainment, life expectancy, and a host of other factors.

If you grew up poor & white, you had it tough. But it’d have been some percentage tougher had you been non-white to boot.

If you’re stuck in poverty now, or stuck among the working poor in a dead-end job, you’ve got it rough. Just like my brother. And however hard that is, it’d be some percent harder if you, or he, was non-white.
To work up from poverty, regardless of color or gender, is a hell of an achievement. I’m sorry if you thought I was belittling that. I wasn’t. You were dealt a shitty hand and you’ve played it very well. Probably better than I would have. Certainly better than the vast majority of people born in your circumstances.

But just because you were dealt a shitty hand doesn’t mean you were dealt the *shittiest *hand.
In this country nowadays, being the “wrong” race or gender is not the destiny it was in my parent’s or grandparent’s generation; what I saw as a kid was pretty much the last generation of adults shaped by that. But today race and gender are not completely irrelevant either.

And that was the point I was trying to make. The US is a harsh place with a lot of painful stories in it. It sounds like I scaped the scab off one of your hard-earned sore spots. I’m sorry if you felt insulted. That certainly wasn’t my intent.

35

I have to support this. I’m white and grew up dirt poor. Trailer trash. I have it good now, and I want to keep what’s mine without giving it all away to social programs (irony? Or knowing that if I can do it, anyone can?). But, being a poor, white kid isn’t the same as being a poor, black kid, at least where I grew up. Once you’re clothed and in school, no one really notices the difference, if you’re white. If you’re black, with few exceptions, the default assumption was that you were poor, and that you were likely to stay that way. In my case, not being black was surely a huge advantage during my younger life. People treated me for who I was rather than where I came from.

As an adult, though, I tend to think that those differences disappear (or become a heck of a lot less important) for educated/trained/skilled people.

36

Effort, no. Talent, yes. I never had to work as hard as other people to get the same results, particularly in school. I’m a grad student and I’m pretty sure this is still the case. I can write something I think is shitty and it will still get a good grade. It’s not that I don’t work hard in school – it’s that my hard work yields more than the average person’s hard work. And because of my academic talent, I was able to get into the best schools and rise from poverty to middle-class security pretty quickly.

That’s a blessing, pure and simple, not anything I ever earned, just an inborn ability I learned to cultivate early on thanks to the encouragement of my family members. But I do think my success is more or less proportional to that talent.

On top of that, I pretty much have the best marriage anyone could ask for. My husband is like the most incredible person on the planet. Do I deserve that? I used to think, ‘‘no way in hell’’ because I felt too deeply flawed to deserve the kind of domestic bliss that is usually reserved for TV shows and the dreams of little children. But eventually I realized that if I were some kind of raving bitch, he wouldn’t be mine. I hesitate to say that I DESERVE him, as if I could do anything at all to EARN him, but I will say that I do my part to make the marriage work.

Now, as for whether I deserve what I got in life, that’s a far more complicated question. Does the fact that upward mobility has been relatively easy for me make up for the soul-crushing childhood I had or all the mental health problems I’ve been plagued with? I’ve been busting my ass in and out of therapy for over 10 years to be mentally healthy. Mental stability is certainly not one of my talents.

And I’ve often asked myself, amidst debilitating depression, whether being so blessed with opportunity really matters if you’re psychologically incapable of enjoying it. To me that seems the ultimate cruelty, to have access to so much goodness yet be incapable of feeling good. That is why I occasionally swap my atheist viewpoint for a theistic one that involves a sadistic god who delights in my torment.

I went through a 6-year span of pretty much continuous severe depression and it took near-heroic effort on my part to stick with the game plan rather than check out early. I don’t experience depression as severely anymore, thanks to my hard work AND my fortunate access to exceptional therapeutic expertise, but after a decade of work my primary diagnosis is still PTSD, and I still suffer from depression and anxiety. I consider these chronic illnesses that I may face for the rest of my life.

Is that fair? I have all these gifts, some clear external measures of success, and have been lucky enough to have some amazing opportunities that I did not, in any way, earn. I also have a marriage bordering on the euphoric. On the flip side, I don’t have anything resembling a loving family of origin, and spent the first two decades of my life being abused and humiliated. This put me at a huge disadvantage for learning to cope with everyday life, just being ‘‘normal’’ is a struggle for me. I second-guess everything I do and worry I’m not good enough constantly.

Do I deserve my life?

37

Yes and mostly.

On the mostly part I feel I got screwed a bit. I deserve to be a multi-billionaire and yet I am not and that is not fair.