To my constant bewilderment, almost everyone around me seems to know what I “deserve.” When I get an internship offer, people scream something to the tune of, “So proud of you, you deserve it!”. My spin instructor (bless her heart) tells me that I “deserve” 10 seconds of rest because I’ve earned it with the other 50 seconds of furious pedaling. Or, when sometimes things don’t go my way, a sympathetic-looking friend might say, “Sorry, you deserved so much better.”

Latent in these comments are massive assumptions about how the world works and how one goes about “earning” stuff that one “deserves.” At Yale and in the professional world, what you “deserve” is often judged by others for you, based on some magic formula of how much work you’ve put in, how difficult the situations you’ve faced were and how nice of a person you generally seem to be. In other words, people assume that good things happen to good people, and that’s the way the world should be. 

As usual, the real world is rarely that simple.

Good things happen to bad people. It doesn’t take a hyper-perceptive person to note that if most people at Yale got what they deserve, it would not be a very pretty picture at all. My four years at Yale have taught me nothing if not for the fact that people will do anything to get ahead. As such, when does “deservingness” cross the line into — yes — entitlement? How often do we overestimate how much we deserve, and assert much more “goodness” than what actually exists deep within us? These are difficult questions to answer.

Bad things also happen to good people. No matter how hard you work, how honest a person you are or how difficult your life situations have been, life never predictably returns your just deserts. This commensurate relationship between good things happening to good people therefore seems to irrevocably break down. What then? 

I am certainly not suggesting that we should all wring our hands and wallow in the inherent self-nothingness of our existence. There is something true and powerful about recognizing our self-worth and that we are all entitled to something. Of course, we should take care that this self-worth does not fester into something prideful and arrogant. Nor should it be based completely on the fragility of public perception.

The other solution is to completely revamp the premise and consider — just for a moment — that you deserve nothing. 

This past week was Holy Week. Christians all around the world united to commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on the cross, and his subsequent resurrection three days later. A classmate in an English class a few weeks ago put me on the spot when she asked, “So, what is the whole deal with Christianity, anyway?” I’d like to humbly offer a rather unconventional answer. A very bad thing (crucifixion) happened to a very good person (Jesus Christ) so that many good things (our current life) could happen to many bad people (Christians). 

I’ve personally found that when one revamps the way of looking at the world, zero-ing out to a point of utter and complete humility, then each day comes as a surprise and a blessing. We don’t chase the next job offer or lacklusterly gloss over the next college acceptance as yet another thing we deserved anyway. No, because we know that we deserved none of it. 

Thousands of years later, I find Christ speaking to our present culture of entitlement in new and surprising ways. The whole point of Easter is that we don’t always get what we deserve. And thank God for that!

SHI WEN YEO edits the Opinion Desk. She is a senior in Morse College, majoring in English and Economics. Her fortnightly column “Through the stained glass” provides a look into campus and national issues from a religious perspective. She can be reached at shiwen.yeo@yale.edu