Goodness is its own reward

Carolyn: Do you believe that what goes around comes around? I’ve seen it too much lately where the bad guy wins. The jerk in my office got the promotion. A guy who cheated on me and all the other girls he dated managed to get a nice girl to marry him. I could go on. I’m starting to wonder what living by the Golden Rule is getting me. – Karma Town

I believe the coming around for the going around of being a jerk – assuming the jerk doesn’t eventually grow into a better person – is dying alone. Even if you have people in your life, the relationships with them are strained, conflicted or outright bad, and so you still die alone even though you have family surrounding your bed. It’s a spouse and children who can’t admit they hate you except maybe in therapy, and only then if they themselves have the nerve to confront and grow from their problems.

Of course, if you have no conscience, then you don’t care. Surely someone cheats for the promotion and gets the girl, and then laughs all the way to the bank while abusing the wife – who, the classic victim, stays by him till he dies – and leaves the world feeling like they won the lottery.

But then the question has to be, do you want that life?

I also don’t believe “what goes around comes around” just so the good can watch the bad get theirs, entertaining though it may be. You feel like the good guy finishing last, I get it, and sympathize.

However, the justice in being good is perfect only if you treat goodness as its own reward.

If religious reasons for this didn’t stick, here’s a pragmatic one:

Make it about a promotion or getting the nice girl, and it becomes a quid-pro-quo, clean-your-room-and-you-can-have-dessert system – which is swell but logistically impossible. You can see when a room is clean; you can’t always know whether an employee is predatory or a mate is cheating, and of course icy roads can’t distinguish nice drivers from mean. So at least some spoils are going to be doled out unfairly.

So, this is really about how to handle unfairness.

I suppose you can let everyone else be good, while you grab what you want on the sly – but it’ll either torment you, or you’re as bad as those who disgust you.

If instead you keep treating others as well as you can, and make your best guess about the way others are treating you, and, when you screw up one of these, try to do better next time, and repeat repeat repeat, then your gratification may occasionally get flecked with envy, frustration and loss. Nevertheless, it will be immediate, constant, and in endless supply – not to mention, totally in your control.