On Deserve

how, why and if, we should still use the word...

taken from 10 things i hate about you (one of the best romcoms to ever do it)

There is a sense of transience implicit in the title “On X” topic that I love. Though it is just as apt to call a piece “My thoughts on self-respect” or “Joseph Brodsky on grief and reason,” there is no need. The personalisation of subject matter is inherent. The aperture of the topic is calibrated to the eye of the author. We know, without ever being told, that these are their thoughts on this subject, and they are liable to change. 

When good fortune strikes, often my knee-jerk response has the word deserve in it. Curious, I searched the word in iMessage and WhatsApp and found it appears more times than I am ever willing to count. 

A musician I like reaches a career milestone: “Absolutely deserved.” 

A friend receives a glowing reference they need for an application: “I’m so proud of you, deserved!” 

A different friend gets their first printed credit in the music video of a beloved British girl group: “I’m so gassed post that on your IG story rn so I can repost and gush bc deserved.” 

Due to societal and religious indoctrination, I don’t have to stretch far to reach for the concept. It makes sense in my little mind, that good things are meant to happen to good people, especially my people. When the Equations of the Universe solve themselves the answer is: of course you got the job/flat/promotion/opportunity/vintage lamp because that is what you deserved.

The people we surround ourselves with are subjectively the hardest working, most dedicated and most persevering people we know. By nature of the established relationship, there is no prerequisite for their success. Awareness of how a person experiences the world and the way the world experiences them is all the evidence needed to justify good fortune. Reason follows that a person deserves a positive result, like a promotion or a creative opportunity, because they have been sedulous enough in the particular area to warrant this. We conflate our perception of others with their capacity for hard work. In the wake of this, the phrase “you deserve this” is no different to saying, “I love you.” Usage is an expression of one’s affection - not an accurate measurement of effort.

On the receiving end of a message in this vein, the floodgates open and ruminations on the moral and ethical implications of what I deserve occur until I’m frazzled. In the hypothetical room implied by a WhatsApp chat, I shake my head and back out slowly, because if the Answers were up to me, I would have nothing and all my loved ones would live like giants, eclipsing the sun. 

However labour is quantified, my measured input always tips just below enough to warrant the good thing. And in the red, I forget about the implied affection completely. Too busy computing how much more time I could’ve dedicated, or how much smarter or important or charitable, I would need to be to feel a semblance of satisfaction. To feel deserving. But deserve, in this sense, is related to justice in the way that I, bearing the same last name, am related to Will Smith – which is not at all. All chips counted, I should just use and interpret the phrase as the declaration of love it is and keep it moving.

Deserve is a very convenient word to kill yourself with; it is easy to call upon, it feels good (until doesn’t) and it makes other people feel good. But ultimately, deserve is temporarily affirming and completely redundant - like all darlings of the meritocracy are.

*

Uncertainty regarding the scales of effort and success are a by-product of my upbringing. Like many, I was told some iteration of the marginalised refrain: “you have to work twice as hard for half as much,” until it formed a mental brand. 

Constant acknowledgement of the supposed lack you must remind myself you do not actually have, but society assigns and treats you according to, is what it means to be black and adolescent in Britain. Your duty becomes working so hard you cannot possibly be shoved by the wayside. In the fight to be seen and valued, education is the most important tool in the immigrant arsenal.

The older I get, the more I am exposed to the seed from which this sentiment is born: fear. 

It is a condensation of all the fears harboured by my mother for my future. Solution-oriented as she is, priming me to get comfortable with inequality young was a way of producing the fortitude I would need to come into my own. Some might say that the fear instilled was effective. I am the high achiever I was raised to be. But I am also spending ample time undoing the damage caused by living in fear and the pressure-cooker it has made of me. Every day I wrestle with the paralysis caused by trying to uphold this duty alongside all the others. And that takes effort that cannot be quantified or traded for any type of capital. 

Having high standards is all good and well, but when quality operates without a threshold? The sky has no limit and neither does the pit. Combine this fear with the inflated sense of humility Black women have adopted to combat stereotypes, and Daughter of Job syndrome¹, and we have a recipe for unmitigated disaster. 

Black Excellence! the chorus chants, but no one wants to get to the root of what constitutes excellence. Or better, what makes it more radical than black mediocrity.

If the caveat to the Equations of the Universe is that fortune only favours those who deserve it, I am comforted as I watch my loved ones excel. The moment I remember this caveat hangs over my own life; I am suffocated by the overwhelming pressure to earn what I have. 

If I am Sisyphus, then wanting to feel deserving of every relationship, every accolade, every shred of kindness bestowed upon me, is the rock I must bear. And even Sisyphus, I’m sure, could see the flaws in caveat the moment we consider what this means for those experiencing grief and misfortune. 

Albert Camus said “success is easy to obtain. The difficult thing is to deserve it.” The Law of Assumption says we have to believe that we deserve success before we obtain it. Meritocracy persuades us that regardless of what is happening around you, if you work hard and you’re a good person (whatever that means) you’ll get what you want - what you deserve. 

Understandably, moral desert is often used to repackage entitlement and call it a human right, or the fingerprints of God. It is more forgiving to remind a person that they deserve a thing than to tell them they are entitled to it. It also forgoes the question of how entitlement is chopped and skewered by concepts such as race, class, and ability, because deserve masquerades as a merit than can be earned. 

*

It can be argued on the account of nepotism baby discourse, the astronomical recognition of EEAAO and its actors, the influx of manifestation content, and the rise of the “therapy generation,” to name a few, that we are as a society contemplating what it means to deserve the life you have. Interrogation of the subject has bled into our collective consciousness. Exacerbated by, but not wholly attributed to the pandemic, it isn't surprising that conversations surrounding the divergences in our futures have become more pervasive. 

After being privy to rhetoric about the indiscriminate and edifying nature of COVID-19, it feels only natural to poke at the systems and schools of thought that support this. For as much evidence as there is to attribute to the Great Equaliser of global crisis, there is just much, if not more, to speak to the pandemic playing favourites. 

Under the logic of Covid, acknowledged or not, the myth of meritocracy crumbles. We were woken to, reminded of, or unable to escape, the reality in which we live. A reality where we aren’t adequately equipped to calculate what we deserve, because the scales were broken when they were delivered to us. And the further on the fringes of society we venture, the worse the inaccuracy gets. Shattered alongside the other delusions of progress under the sweeping force of the virus, deserve has little place in post-pandemic dialogue. 

Reverberations from this damage have propelled the excogitation of class signifiers and offshoots like the re-examining of the cult of celebrity online. The more people reckon with the influence capitalism has on meritocracy, the sourer “deserve” grows in the mouth. Though I am cynical enough to doubt these reckonings will lead to any fundamental change, I do believe they’re important on a personal level. 

We throw darts at shadows and some of them corporealize. That is something. 

Deserve is most notably a sleeper agent. The kind that subsists on success stories of social mobility, the beliefs collected by your parents about how they would have evaded personal heartbreaks of all kinds, and tarot card readings pulled by a stranger on your for you page. Its muscle fibres are full of mistruths and exceptions taken as rules but that does not make it any harder to cling onto. These flaws don’t prevent a person from writing sermons on what their community deserves, or the fear they harbour in regard to what they believe they do not. Our reliance on moral desert to get from day to day is a reliance on delusion. And as the aphorism states: all things in moderation. 

I had a friend ask me to write about my thoughts about being hard on yourself. My answer (as if to say the rest of the essay wasn’t also an answer) is this:

I think that people that are hard workers - the people crowned the Stakhanovites of their respective echo chambers - are imprisoned by their perception of what they deserve. Pouring all their hope into the lottery of earning the life they envision when others stumble upon the same fate, or superior, by nature of birth. Other times, I think they’re just the people that do not have the time to be deterred by the hand they’re dealt. These people are swallowed by survival, in the womb or sometime after it, and so do not get to be swallowed by anything else. The latter births the former. Chicken meet egg. 

1. Daughter of Job syndrome: the mindset (wanted or not) that you will be rewarded for your ability to endure. That if you can master not cursing god, master positive self-talk, morning affirmations and the supplementary meditation, the tenfold is glorious.