From Men's Health by way of Walter Kirn:
"To some guys, gambling is entertainment. They play, they lose, they grumble, but they have fun. To me, though, gambling is psychoanalysis, continually probing the weak spots in my thinking, leveling my mood swings, and reminding me that defeat is not an option in life; it's an absolute, inescapable certainty. This knowledge is freeing if you can handle it, but what's even more liberating is accepting that no one can handle it fully or all the time. We win a few, we lose a few, and our drive to win more often than we lose is what makes us both suckers and human beings.
Life is unfair,to me, the drunk laments, which leads him to drink even harder and withdraw even further from life. The gambler, however, assuming he's willing to learn, knows that life's unfairness isn't personal. It's universal. It's built into the game. Unfairness is, in Vegas terms, the house rule - and this understanding allows the gambler to play on."
Has life been fair to us? Maybe the question itself is an issue. As far as I can figure, people who are free from a sense of entitlement - that they deserve respect, or pay, or attention, or agreement, or perfection, or forgiveness - have great shock absorbers against the inevitable irregularities of the week.
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