Life's Not Fair

Dude, Where's My Car?!

Every now and then, I hear a story about a famous person or someone I know personally getting arrested for DWI (driving while intoxicated), and it always evokes some not-so-pleasant feelings in me—feelings of guilt and shame as I'm reminded of the handful of times during my college days when, after a night of drinking way too much, I would forgo the discomfort of a friend's couch and make the stupid decision to get into my car, drunk, and drive myself back to my apartment to sleep in my own bed.

One particular story that stands out begins with me waking up in my apartment—dazed, confused, and incredibly hungover—with no recollection of what had happened the night before. Eventually, the nausea that comes with having stale liquor sitting in your stomach inspired me to get up and get some food. This was back in my meat-eating days, and my favorite hangover meal was a triple order of hashbrowns from Waffle House—smothered (with onions), chunked (with ham), and capped (with mushrooms).

Luckily for me, there was a Waffle House less than two miles from my apartment at the time. Unluckily for me, when I went outside to get into my car, I was dismayed to find that it was nowhere to be found. I must have searched the parking lot directly in front of my apartment—filled with around 100 cars—for a good 10 minutes, desperately trying to locate my 1997 Ford Escort, endearingly named Toot Toot (because that's what she did around town!), but she was nowhere to be found.

Panic ensues, and soon after, I'm on the phone with each of my friends, trying to piece together what happened the night before, how I got back home, and where the fuck I left my car. My friends all tell me they saw me leave by myself, with my keys in my hand. This confirms that I didn’t get a ride home from someone else, which is both a little comforting and a little disconcerting—comforting because it means I must have driven myself home safely since I wasn’t in the hospital or a jail cell, and disconcerting because it must mean my car was towed or, even worse, stolen.

Long story short, I eventually find my car. Where I was living at the time was one of those huge student housing apartment developments with different "blocks," and there must not have been any open parking spaces in the block outside my apartment, so I had to park a couple of blocks down. I found Toot Toot by walking the entire apartment complex while pressing the "panic" button on my key fob, elated when I finally heard the alarm going off. From that point on, I told myself I would never drive drunk again.

I say all that to say this: there have been people who’ve gotten arrested, charged, and had their life paths significantly altered—if not ruined—by driving while just over the legal limit. I, on the other hand, was clearly way too intoxicated to be on the road, given that I couldn’t even remember driving home. But since I wasn’t caught, and since, by the grace of God, I didn’t harm anyone else or myself, I effectively got off scot-free—and that’s not fair!

There were several other times when, upon returning to a friend’s house from a party and being offered the couch to crash, I politely declined and instead got into my car, knowing good and damn well that I shouldn’t be driving and that if I got pulled over, it would be game over for me. But I did it anyway, and luckily, I always made it back home safely. But why was I spared in my multiple instances of insolence while others only drove drunk once and ruined their own or other people’s lives?

I don’t know why. I guess because life’s not fair.

It’s not fair that I’ve somehow escaped producing an unwanted child despite often carelessly putting myself in a position for that to happen. It’s not fair that I essentially got my college education for free. It’s not fair that my father is 5’10”, my mother was 5’6”, and yet I’m somehow 6’1”, which gives me an unfair advantage both in athletic sports and in the sport of attracting a mate.

It’s also not fair that I was born into poverty. Or that I lost my mother and my hair—two things that were critical to my identity and sense of self—at the young age of 26, and that if I ever do have children, they will never get to meet their grandmother in the flesh. It’s not fair that an accident when I was 16 left me with an invisible disability that no one knows about, cares about, or works to accommodate—because they can’t see it and it seemingly has no effect on my life.

It’s not fair that the vast majority of us will have to spend the vast majority of our lives working while a class of billionaires gets to dictate the bounds in which those lives exist. It’s not fair that people have been locked in cages for years after receiving a felony charge over possession of a plant, yet the sitting president was convicted of 34 felonies—and that somehow made him more appealing to his bootlicking base. It’s not fair that the vast majority of Americans have nothing against Canada, Mexico, Greenland, or any other country Trump is targeting with his foolishness, yet we are all going to be blamed for whatever damage he causes.

We like to pretend that life is some equal playing field where everyone has similar opportunities to succeed, everyone is governed by the same laws, and those of us who rise to the top do it through hard work and effort—but this is just demonstrably untrue. Talent, in and of itself, is unfair because, though we all have talents, some of us are naturally more talented than others. Sure, hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard, but when talent does work hard, there’s no amount of merit that can overcome a natural advantage.

Take sports, for instance—exploiting unfair advantages is a major part of strategy in all sports. In basketball specifically, we often look for the mismatch—that is, we want to get the ball to someone who is bigger, faster, and/or stronger than the person guarding them in order to exploit the mismatch. There are even plays designed to help create this type of situation where, say, a shorter guard might have to switch onto a taller center, giving the center an unfair advantage and the ability to shoot over the guard for an easy bucket.

So, what’s the root of the cognitive dissonance? Why do we acknowledge and celebrate unfairness in some contexts but not others? Well, I think it’s because we’d all like to believe that we are the reason all the good things in life have happened to us, while God, the devil, our bosses, or some dictator is responsible for all the bad things. If we acknowledged that unfairness is an essential part of life that sometimes benefits us, then we’d also have to accept that life’s unfairness sometimes hurts us—and I think that’s a hard thing to accept because it would mean admitting that the individual is not in total control of what happens in our lives but instead the course of our lives are subject to some mysterious and often unfair force.

I’ve been both the sufferer and the enjoyer of unfairness, and you likely have been too. And this is extremely important to acknowledge, in my opinion, because it allows us to have more compassion for ourselves and others. We all have privileges and disadvantages. We all have blessings and curses. And while it’s true that if we compare our lives to the lives of others, life may never seem fair—I have a theory that, on an individual level, life is always fair. I think everyone’s life balances out eventually, and if not, death itself is the great balancer that returns all of our accounts back to zero. When we stop focusing so much on what we don't have, I think it becomes much easier to see just how unfairly blessed we've been too.

Every individual suffers in the game of life

I’ve spent the past four days in bed after what I thought was just my sinuses draining but has turned out to be a more serious ailment. I’m definitely on the mend, but I’ve spent the last four days suffering—and why? Because I needed to go to Trader Joe’s to get food for myself, and because someone in Trader Joe’s was sick, I breathed in their germs, and now I’m sick. Is that fair? I’d say yes and no. No, because I didn’t technically do anything directly to deserve the discomfort I’ve been experiencing. Yes, because a large part of what makes humans human is our capacity to suffer—and our inability to escape being both the cause of and the relief of so much suffering for each other.

Some religious people like to say, “Favor ain't fair,” as if to suggest that the Universe gives preferential blessings to those it really likes. But I think this is quite foolish and more rooted in ego than in any kind of truth. My biggest blessings are directly tied to the most “unfair” things that have happened to me. So the idea that God’s favor only comes through receiving positive, desirable outcomes is not rooted in reality but rather in fantasy—a fantasy where one’s ego gets everything it wants, regardless of what one’s soul needs. And in my experience, what one’s soul needs is often unfairness, because it’s through acknowledging life’s outward unfairness that we turn inward and become aware of the aspect of our being that is One with everything else in existence. And from the perspective of Oneness, life is always fair.

So, perhaps what’s better than saying “life’s unfair” is saying that “life’s mysterious.” Sometimes we’re up, sometimes we’re down. Sometimes everything makes sense. Sometimes nothing does. Sometimes you’re the hammer, and sometimes you’re the nail—but all the time, we each play an integral part in this game we call life. And I think if we can become less attached to our individual parts and more aligned with how our parts contribute to the whole, we’ll understand that fairness only really becomes a problem when we see ourselves as separate from everything else.

"Yoga Flame" + What's Going On With Me?

Yoga Flame

Back in 2015 I published my first beat tape, "Yoga Flame", on Soundcloud and it was received really well by the relatively small group of people who listened to it. For whatever reason, I took it down from Soundcloud that same year and it hasn't been posted anywhere else online since then.

If you've been watching my stories on Instagram you know I've really been getting back into making music this year and have decided that I want to share my music online for me and for anyone else who might enjoy it, so a couple days ago, I uploaded "Yoga Flame" to my music YouTube, "Micheal Sinclair Sounds" (original, I know lol) and will be uploading more stuff throughout the year! It was important for me to upload this old beat tape first before any of my newer stuff because I want to see how I've grown. If you want to check it out, tap the image above or embed below.

What's Going On With Me?

I'm almost 100% but I'm still recovering from being sick and still have some brain fog so apologies if this newsletter feels disjointed or doesn't flow as smoothly as normal. I hate being sick. It honestly turns me into a big baby. Luckily, I don't get sick often and when I do, I'm usually alone so there's no one for me to whine to, lol. And I must admit that each time I get sick, I come out on the other end of it with a much greater appreciation for feeling "normal" and for life in general. I heard a quote recently that goes "Healthy people want everything but sick people just want to be healthy" and I think that's just so true. Our bodies are our primary experience and if we don't feel right in our bodies, nothing else matters.

I honestly feel like me getting sick was a blessing in disguise. I'd been being guided to slow down over the past couple weeks which confused me because since I quit my job last month, I've been in hustle mode. I have a decent amount of money saved up but I'd rather not drain my savings completely so I've been working to diversity streams of income to make sure that doesn't happen. But, for some reason, I'd been being guided to chill out and rest, though my ego found this extremely hard to do out of the threat of spending all my money. And so, I feel like the Universe delivered me this illness as a way of saying "I told you to sit your ass down!", lol. And so, I've been on my ass.

Often when I get sick, I have these spiritual experiences. Sometimes they feel like visions or hallucinations or like something in my body is being attuned or worked on in some way. I recall once back in 2016 after eating a bad piece of tilapia, getting sick with what I thought was food poisoning, though I couldn't poop or throw up, but became extremely ill and fatigued and couldn't do anything but lay on my couch for a couple days straight and sleep. During this spell, I kept drifting in and out of consciousness and having this recurring dream of gears being aligned—the types of gears that you would see inside a grandfather clock—aligning themselves into each other's grooves and turning. I had no idea what it meant but it felt like that's what was happening inside of me.

With this most recent illness, there were no visions but I did keep hearing a voice say to me,

"You've done enough. Relax and receive."

"You've done enough. Relax and receive."

"You've done enough. Relax and receive."

And I must admit—this is hard to accept but I'm going to try my best to accept it and to trust it. This past year, and almost a half, in Pittsburgh has been extremely healing and transformative for me, just like I knew it would be. But my time here is coming to an end. And I'm going to do my best to spend the remaining time I have here relaxing, receiving, exploring, and enjoying this beautiful city, which will undoubtedly always have a special place in my heart, before I'm off on my next grand adventure.

I hope the coming week allows you to relax and receive as well.

With love,

Micheal Sinclair 💜