The Unfiltered · Monday · No. 9
I need to say something and I don’t care if it makes me sound bitter, because right now I am bitter.
Watched it happen again this week. Someone who lies for a living, cuts every corner there is, screws people over and smiles doing it — and it worked. Again. No consequence. No karma bus. Nothing falling on his head. He’s fine. He’s better than fine, he’s winning, and he’ll keep winning, because apparently none of it matters as long as you don’t get caught, and he never gets caught, because guys like that never do.
Meanwhile I’m over here trying to do it right and it feels like the universe has singled me out for extra homework.
That’s not fair and I know it’s not fair and I’m saying it anyway.
I do the harder thing. I keep the promise nobody’s checking on. I eat the cost instead of passing it to someone else. And it doesn’t feel like integrity right now. It feels like a tax I’m the only one paying, while the guy cutting every corner drives off richer, happier, completely un-fucked-with, like the whole system took one look at him and decided he was exempt.
I want there to be a ledger. I want there to be some cosmic accountant somewhere quietly writing down what he owes and when the bill’s coming due. I have no actual reason to believe that ledger exists. I want it anyway. Tonight I want it so bad it’s making me angry at people who aren’t even involved in this.
There’s a Stoic idea I’ve leaned on before — that virtue’s supposed to be its own reward, that you do the right thing because it’s right, full stop, no invoice attached, no guarantee the universe notices or cares. I’ve written that idea. I’ve meant it, mostly. Tonight I kind of hate it.
Because it’s easy to say “virtue is its own reward” when nobody’s actively watching a bad man get rewarded twice — once for the thing he did wrong, and again for getting away with it clean. Marcus never had to watch it on a screen, in real time, with a smile attached. I do. And knowing intellectually that the universe never promised me a scoreboard doesn’t make it hurt less that there so clearly isn’t one.
Let me be exact about what I’m actually asking for, because I don’t want to bullshit this part.
I don’t want him punished. I keep saying “karma bus” like that’s the wish, and it isn’t, not really. I don’t lie awake wanting bad things to land on him specifically. That’s not the itch. The itch is smaller and more selfish than that and I’d rather admit it than dress it up as justice: I just want the scale to level out on my side. Not his losses. My win. I want the thing I’m actually fighting for — the version of my life I’m building slowly, honestly, at full price, one decision at a time — to just once show up on schedule, instead of always somewhere further down the road that I have to take on faith.
That’s the real wish, in the back of my head, on a night like this. Not “let him suffer.” Just — let it be my turn. Let the thing I’ve been quietly earning actually arrive.
I’m not going to pretend I’ve made peace with the fact that it might not. It might not. Guys like that die in their sleep sometimes, rich, unbothered, having never paid for anything, while good men are still waiting on a turn that’s technically still theirs and never quite lands. That’s a real possibility. I hate it. I’m not going to perform having made peace with it just because I know the philosophy that’s supposed to get me there.
But here’s the part that isn’t in question, even tonight, even this angry: I know who I am. I’ve decided who I am, a long time ago, in smaller rooms than this one, and I’m not renegotiating that just because someone else is winning ugly this week. I’m still going to be the guy who keeps his word. I’m still going to do the work on myself that nobody’s grading. Not because I’ve solved the unfairness — I haven’t, clearly, I’m sitting here furious about it — but because faking it the other way, becoming the guy who cuts corners to catch up, isn’t a version of winning I actually want. It’s just losing slower, dressed up as strategy.
So the anger stays. The wish stays too — quiet, in the back, that the scale evens out and it’s finally my turn. I’m not going to lie and say I’ve let go of wanting that.
I’m just not going to stop being good while I wait for it.
The Unfiltered runs every Monday — no lessons, no answers. Just what’s true.
