What You Keep Calling Unfair
- Apr 10
- 8 min read
The hard reality of life is that some of the hardest times of your life will arrive when you started something with everything you had. You take the first real step — quietly, carefully, with everything you have. And something you had barely begun was already being taken away because of the situations that took place.
Whatever adversity you currently face, whatever circumstances have been forced upon you, however quickly and severely they are reshaping the conditions of your life. These are the most important times of your life that shape your life the same way you dreamed — but if you move through them without understanding what they are asking of you, you will find yourself repeating the same patterns, blaming your life, and luck.
When life moves against you without warning, something in most people simply gives way. They reach outside themselves first — for a hand, a sign, anything that feels like rescue. And when no external solution arises on its own, they split into two equally destructive paths — give up or take reckless actions — which only make the situation worse.
And then fear does what fear always does — it makes everything smaller, draws you back to the comfort of the old life, the one that felt safe precisely because it asked nothing of you. Some will never go back to try to build something they actually want. And some will eventually find the courage to begin again — only to repeat the same pattern, in a different version, which keeps ending the same way.
"Security is the most attractive trap ever built. It asks nothing of you — and gives you nothing worth having in return”.
Why Life Plays Tough on Us
There is a question almost every person has asked at some point — usually alone, usually at night, “Why does life feel so unfair to me”?
But before we go looking for the answer, there is one thing worth saying first — if life is unfair, it is unfair with everyone, without exception; and if life is fair, it is fair with everyone, without exception. It does not reserve its hardest seasons for the struggling and spare the successful. It does not check your bank account or your dreams before it decides what to send your way.
Now coming back to our main query — to explore this question with any real clarity, you must first be willing to turn it inward — ask yourself honestly what you have been striving toward, and how many times you have already abandoned that direction and replaced it with another.
Because this is where the truth hides — in whether those difficult times were sent to create suffering, or to move you, finally and firmly, in the direction of what you have always been reaching for.
“Life is not unfair with us, it's never been, but it is we who are unfair with us.” To clarify this, I want to share a story. Not a famous one. Not someone you will find in a book or a documentary. Someone I know personally — my cousin.
He was average in school. The kind of student nobody notices. He graduated, found his way into corporate life, and worked for some big multinational companies. From the outside, it looked like a life. But he knew something that the outside couldn’t see — that none of it was his. He had always been drawn to art. He just didn’t know yet which form of it was meant for him.
So he looked. For years, while holding down a job to pay his bills, he tried everything. Painting. Writing. Editing. Poetry. Some attempts weren’t even art — they were business ideas he threw himself into and failed at badly. Most people would have stopped somewhere in that stretch of failures and called it a sign. He didn’t. He kept moving, kept searching, kept listening to the thing inside him that refused to settle.
Then in 2023, something shifted. He told me he had this gut feeling — quiet but persistent — that commercial photography was it. That if he gave it a real chance, something would open up.
He went all in. Online courses, equipment, a studio setup — a full year of learning before he even thought about clients. And slowly, the pieces started falling into place. He built a website. He started putting his work out into the world. Things were moving. For the first time in a long time, he was exactly where he wanted to be — not at the destination yet, but finally on the right road.
And then life did what it sometimes does at the worst possible moment.
His only brother died. Suddenly, from a severe health condition nobody saw coming. The grief alone would have been enough to break most people. But on top of it, he was now the primary earner for his entire family. The weight of that responsibility landed on him all at once — and the dream he had spent years building was still nowhere near established enough to carry it.
"Grief and disruption are not the enemies of your dream. They are the editors of it”.
He could have stopped there. Nobody would have blamed him. But he didn’t stop. He made the quiet, difficult decision to keep going — at the same pace, with the same intention — because giving up on the dream was simply not something he was willing to do.
A few months passed. Things steadied. He was balancing the job and the photography — slowly, carefully, the way you carry something fragile over uneven ground.
And inside, he told me, there was this fire. Every day and night, his mind was running the numbers, imagining the life his photography business could build. The excitement was real. The vision was clear. He just couldn’t move as fast as he wanted to — the job was taking most of his time and energy, and the dream had to wait for whatever was left.
Then life threw another blow.
His company announced layoffs. Cost-cutting. He was one of the people let go. When he told me, I felt it in my chest — because I knew everything he was carrying. The family depends on him. The dream is still unfinished. The grief is still fresh. Any reasonable person in his position would have gone straight back to job hunting. That is what fear tells you to do. Find safety. Find something stable. Deal with the dream later.
But he was calm in a way that surprised even me. He had been through enough storms by now to know that panic was not a strategy.
Instead, he sat down and thought it through like a man who had finally decided to trust himself. He did the numbers. Between his savings, his severance, and the deductions he had accumulated, he had enough to live exactly as he had been living for a full year, with some left over. One year. That was all he needed to give the photography business everything he had.
So he did. He gave it his days and his nights, his full attention, his complete belief. And it didn’t even take a year. In eight months, he had built an income from his photography that exceeded his corporate salary. And it was still growing.
Lessons From the Story
Train Your Mind To Look With Clarity
Nothing life sends your way is designed to keep you stuck. It is designed to move you. The only question is whether you are paying close enough attention to see which direction it is pointing.
My cousin's search for his passion was marked by repeated failure — and yet he persisted, because he had the clarity to see that life was not working against him in those moments, but actively pushing him toward the direction he was always meant to find.
He went with life instead of against it. He carried this deep, steady trust that whenever something was falling apart, it was only because something far more fitting was being built in its place.
And so he never let the noise win — not the overthinking, not the weight of what others expected, not the quiet fear of falling behind. Because if he had, he would still be circling the same life, never quite finding the one that was actually his.
Your Emotions Make Your Life Worse, Not the Event.
If you sit down and honestly trace the decisions that have shaped your life, the ones that hurt you most, the ones that sent you backward, you will find that nearly all of them were made by the version of you that was afraid, not the version of you that was thinking clearly.
When losing his job, he didn't hand the decision over to his fear. He paused, turned inward, and asked the question most people never think to ask in their worst moments — what is this actually here for?
He had long understood that the job was the primary obstacle to the full pursuit of his ambition. Life, by removing it, had not punished him — it had eliminated the very constraint that was slowing his progress and handed him the one thing he actually needed: time.
He understood the full equation: no layoff meant no compensation, no financial runway, no real shot at the life he was building toward. Another job would have restored the illusion of security while quietly ensuring that his ambition remained permanently secondary to someone else's schedule.
That is how the best things tend to arrive — not clearly, not gently, but buried inside the moments that first made you feel like everything was falling apart.
Right Approach to Deal With Tough Times
Life is always finding a way to bring you closer to where you are meant to be. It never stopped working in your favor. The hardships, the dead ends, the things that feel like punishment — they only exist the way the mind makes them exist, through the lens it has spent years learning to look through.
Life operates in alignment with your deepest wants. The friction that appears to obstruct that alignment is not external — it is generated entirely by the mind through impulsive, emotionally driven action that works against the very direction it should be following.
"Discipline without direction is just suffering with a schedule."
Start with the mind. Teach it to be still when life is not. Because a calm mind is a clear mind, and a clear mind can see what a frightened one never could. Look at what you have been desiring — not years ago, now, recently — and trace it back to the thing that has always been at the center of you. The dots connect. They were always connected.
Before acting, turn inward. Your instincts — your gut feeling, your deeper knowing — carry intelligence that fear does not. They will show you the next move if you are quiet enough to hear them.
But when you bypass them and act from fear instead, you create direct opposition between the order life is working to establish for you and the chaos your reactive mind is generating. That friction is what failure feels like from the inside. That is what delay feels like. That is what you have been calling unfair — when really, life was never the one working against you. You were.
Conclusion
The one who learns to wait without losing faith in life is the one who finally sees that we are not living the life — we are the life. And it follows an order that has never once broken its own rules.
Pay attention to what nature does. The trees, the mountains, the rivers, even the animals — none of them fight the life they are living. They simply move with it, through all of it, without resistance. They endure every change the year brings — and on the other side of all of it, they bloom again, stronger and more alive than the version of themselves that went in.
The moment you know what you want, the work is not to manufacture the way toward it. The work is to trust yourself, stay the course, and allow life to do what it has always done — clear the path for those who are willing to walk it. Train your mind to read the path life is laying down — not to fight it, not to look away from it.
Here is what I know to be true: Life does not place obstacles in your path out of cruelty. It places them in front of the people who have unknowingly been walking away from their own purpose. Your struggles are not the end of the road. They are the road, pointing you back to yourself.
"The version of you that is afraid is not protecting you. It is just more familiar with failure."
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-Sachin Khare
