"Life isn't fair." How often I heard that from my father! And my mother, too, come to think of it. The sentiment does not comfort children.

I also heard the sentence - thousands of times - from my paternal grandmother I grew up with. "Life isn't fair" did not make me a pessimist, just on the contrary. It prepared me physically and emotionally for the obstacles I faced in my life as an orphan. I think "life isn't fair" is a synonym for "natural selection"...