Just Deserts (or Not)
This week, a conversation with a client inspired my latest spiral of thinking. A lot of people I work with, and a lot of people I know in general, have a deep belief that they are not “deserving” of positive things in life, like joy, safety, relationship security, and so on. I’ve felt this way myself plenty of times. What does it mean, though, to deserve something, especially something that is positive and helpful? Can we deserve the bad things that happen to us? Who is it, exactly, that’s dishing out these rewards and punishments, anyway? I’m not sure these questions are even meaningful in the first place. But let’s chase this rabbit.
Ok, here goes a most trite cliche: the dictionary (Merriam-Webster, in this case) defines deserve as “to be worthy of; merit; to be worthy, fit, or suitable for some reward or requital.” Given that, who then deserves to be happy or safe or loved? And who doesn’t? Who deserves a small rock to always be in their shoe and to never be able to find the cool side of the pillow? Now, I’m certainly not the first person to ever consider these sorts of ideas, and finer philosophers and theologians than me have thought about reward and punishment for centuries. I’d like to skip the theology altogether, and honestly I doubt what I’m writing rises to the level of philosophy as such. But here it is: how does the average rando understand sweeping ideas like the deserving of goodness or ill, reward and punishment?
My instinct here is that human beings deserve a certain level of happiness or contentedness simply for the fact that we are human. I don’t mean that everything in life will be perfect or that there will be no suffering because that’s simply not reality. And after all, some adversity can push us to do more, learn more, reach a different level. I think everyone deserves to have moments of enjoyment, creativity, and safety, as much as is possible. Yes, even that guy. And her. And them. I don’t think there is anyone inherently unworthy of positive experiences, though I often sit with people who feel this way about themselves.
Less often do I sit with people who feel that there are others who don’t deserve positivity. However, there is certainly a lot of discussion about this in our broader culture. From all sides, there are people blathering about why this certain individual or group of folks are The Problem. And being The Problem, these people deserve any awful thing that comes their way. It’s a bit simplistic, and it brings up simplistic solutions. If The Problem is eliminated, we will all be happy again. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work this way. I also wonder if The Problem gets to experience contentedness, perhaps they will be less, well, problematic.
Who deals out all this contentedness and suffering, anyway? God? Great. (I said I was going to veer away from theology. This was a lie.) Humans can also reward and punish other humans, and this can happen intentionally or not. Is there some other mechanism at play? Maybe karma, which doesn’t work the way most Western people think it does, but it provides a mechanism for determining who deserves what. All of these ideas about cosmological reward and punishment assume that if we all just behave ourselves, good things will happen, but everyone I know has pondered why bad things happen to good people. I also frequently ask the opposite: why do good things happen to bad people? There is no simple formula for this.
I’m therefore back to my original premise, which is that everyone deserves and should be able to experience joy, safety, love, simply because they are human. No behavioral requirements, no gifts from the universe or a deity. No need to earn good experiences. There are other reasons to be a good person and act the right way, but the idea that you might be rewarded with the feeling of joy or peace shouldn’t be one of them. It’s enough to be human. Being human is hard enough, anyway, so why not embrace the idea that all of us should have a baseline of security and at least some measure of happiness?
Can we want this for ourselves and for others, even for the people we really can’t stand? What makes any individual happy will vary, of course. Still, what would it be like to start from the assumption that people can seek the things that bring them joy, and that that can be the foundation of life rather than its end goal? I’m not even sure that I allow myself to feel deserving of happiness. I wonder if I can embrace the idea of happiness as a baseline. I wonder what might be different in my life if I did.