When reality trumps idealistic thinking

I bet some of you believe in Karma. The idea is a pretty cool one. It is the thought that when you do good things, good things will just happen for you. If you go to the old folk’s home and read to people, then you should also go to the casino or buy a lotto ticket because good things are coming your way.

Whenever I say this it tends to piss people off, but, it really seems quite silly to me. I used to believe in Karma. I believed for two reasons, 1) because I hadn’t put much thought into it and 2) because it seemed like a really neat concept that all of my hippy friends believed in anyways so I wanted to believe in it too.

There is just one problem with it. That problem being that it doesn’t exist. If karma was real then don’t you think that all of those brilliant yet greedy politicians and lawyers would be in the in the philanthropist business, putting in 14 hours a day raising money for less fortunate people rather than doing what actually makes them rich? Ironically what actually makes them rich is very often immoral things that harm others and serve their own greedy agendas, something that would cause “bad Karma” for someone who believes in it.

I am not trying to brag by any means here but I have always gone through life with good intentions, and a willingness to help people who need it. I think I have done a good job at being a parent, a son, and friend to everyone I know. Not perfect by any means, but good. Where is my good Karma? Why don’t I have a new car and my own house? I will tell you why, because I never did the stuff necessary when I was young to achieve these things. I opted to spend my time having fun and slacking rather than attaining and keeping a good job with room for advancement, and because of that, all of the good deeds in the world aren’t going to cure my gout (a treatable form of arthritis that I get in my foot) until I find a way to get good health insurance that will pay for me to have it treated properly. That is not going to happen until I figure out a way to make it happen. It will never happen if I sit around just being “good” waiting for karma to do it for me.

I don’t want my statements to come off in a negative light; I am not saying that you shouldn’t do good things. You should always do good things whether they are in your best interest or not. The part where I have a problem is it seems like some people do good things and say they are trying to build up good karma. I find this somewhat disturbing. You should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, not because of some cosmic balance out there somewhere in our atmosphere waiting to reward you for all of your good deeds.

Success is almost always a direct result of something you did to make that success happen anyways. The people out there who have all of life’s riches are the ones who made it happen by going to school, working hard, and showing people the respect that they would expect in return. Now that last part might sound like Karma if you don’t think it through. Treat people nice and you will be treated nice, but there is an explanation for that. When you are talking to someone who is always nice, you’re going to be nice to them. And when you see someone who is always treating people like shit, you’re going to be a dick to that person. It’s more like common sense than it is Karma.

I feel kind of dumb explaining all of this stuff because it seems so obvious to me and I feel like I am explaining why you can’t store a bowling ball on the peak of your roof but there are people out there who swear by Karma. Lots of them, some of them are my closest friends. To me it is just idealistic thinking that hasn’t been thought out because we want to believe that the world is good. But lots of great people die young everyday and plenty of horrible excuses for human beings live long lives with great amounts of success.

Just take a look at Pol Pot (Cambodian leader whose rule, through the combined effects of slave labor, malnutrition, poor medical care, and executions resulted in the deaths of an estimated 750,000 to 1.7 million people, approximately 26% of the Cambodian population*) lives to be 70 years old and dies of natural causes. But someone like Princess Diana who did so much good in the world was killed by a bunch of greedy bastards on motorcycles who chased her down so they could exploit her to the tabloids for money?

I am sure this comes off as pretty brutal to some of your belief systems and I am not trying to insult anyone’s philosophy. I just think your ideas are stupid and you should agree with what I say.



*Wikipedia reference