That’s Not Fair

On toddlers, Stoicism, self-pity and the first philosophy of the body

For about three years now, my daughter has been saying, “That’s not fair.”

She says it with conviction. Not as a throwaway complaint, or not only that. She means it. She has understood something. She knows when the deal has changed, when the explanation does not match the outcome, when the rules have been applied differently, or when the world has failed to arrange itself in a way that makes moral sense.

Sometimes the injustice is small. Who got the bigger strawberry, who had the first turn on the seesaw, who got to sit with mum. But the feeling underneath is not small to her. It is total. The whole structure of the world seems, for a moment, to depend on whether this thing has been done properly.

Now my son has started saying it too. He is two and a half, and there is a threshold he has crossed. He is still tiny, still soft around the edges, still closer to babyhood than childhood, but he has arrived in the moral universe. He has started negotiating, comparing, making appeals to an order he has only just discovered.

“That’s not fair.”

He does not know what fairness would look like. But he knows, with complete bodily certainty, that something has gone wrong. It is not yet philosophy, but the seed of it.

Having children reminds you that fairness is not an abstract idea we acquire later. It is one of the first ways we experience the world. Long before we can explain justice, we can feel injustice. The child does not say, “I have identified an inconsistency in the moral framework.” The child says, “That’s not fair.”

And often the child is right. Not about the solution, or the scale of the offence, but that fairness matters: that rules mean something, that power should be answerable, and that there is a difference between not getting what you want and being treated in a way that is wrong.

Adults are quick to hear “that’s not fair” as whining. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it is a child practising one of the central human acts: noticing that the world is not neutral, and asking it to explain itself.

I think philosophy begins in our first refusal to believe that “because I said so” is a good enough answer. Not because parents are tyrants, but because children discover that authority and explanation are not the same thing.

A toddler’s outrage is raw and exhausting, but it is recognisable. It survives into adult life, with better vocabulary and worse honesty. We stop stamping our feet but we do not stop feeling the unfairness. We dress it up. We give it adult names: principle, grievance, justice. Sometimes those words are noble and necessary. Sometimes they are a more sophisticated way of saying, “Why did they get the bigger slice?”

The question underneath is worth taking seriously. Moral philosophy begins with questions like these. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why should I be good in a world that does not guarantee goodness in return? Why is effort not the same as reward? At the root of these questions is a protest. A human being looking at the arrangement of things and saying: this should not be how things are.

Philosophy is what happens when childish outrage learns to stay in the room long enough to become thought. The feeling is hot and immediate. The thoughts that follow are slower: what would fairness be here? What am I owed? What must I accept, and what must I not pretend to accept?

That last question matters, because acceptance can be a virtue, and it can be a hiding place.

Which brings me to Stoicism, or the version of it now fashionable in certain corners of the internet. I do not mean the whole tradition, which is richer and stranger than its online summaries. At its best, Stoicism asks us to distinguish between what is within our control and what is not, and not to be ruled by every passing appetite, fear or humiliation.

There is wisdom in that. Anyone who has spent ten minutes with a small child knows that not every feeling deserves to govern the room. There is mercy in learning that the world does not stop turning because you are disappointed, and freedom in realising that other people’s choices, the weather, the past, chance and time cannot be brought under the command of your will.

But there is another thing calling itself Stoicism now. Harder, flatter, more performative. Less about wisdom than control: not understanding pain but proving you can withstand it. It tells people, particularly men, to become harder, quieter, less permeable to the world. Its commandments are simple: don’t complain, don’t need too much, don’t let anyone see the wound.

Stoicism like this is self-pity in armour. Rather than asking whether something is wrong, the wearer takes pride in enduring it. The grievance remains, but it is polished into a personality. From a distance that can look like maturity. But it is a strange kind of strength if it depends on refusing to hear yourself.

On the other end of the scale is the adult who never grows out of toddlerdom, who turns every frustration into persecution. Delays become disrespect, boundaries become rejection, unequal outcomes become personal injury.

Children have to learn proportion: that wanting something does not make it just, that fairness is not preference, that other people are real. Nobody wants to live with an adult who has kept the moral range of a toddler.

But adults have to learn something else: that acceptance is not always wisdom. Resentment can be information. Exhaustion can be evidence. The part of you saying “this is not right” may be the most truthful part of you still speaking.

The adult who grows too far away from the child may become unable to recognise injury at all. They endure an unfair relationship, workplace, expectation, or demand on the body and call their silence strength, confusing endurance with wisdom until the complaints cease to register.

The permanent toddler says, “Everything is unfair because everything should be arranged around me.” The false Stoic says, “Nothing is unfair because I can teach myself to endure anything.” Neither is wise. Both are still trapped inside the original cry. One keeps shouting it at the world. The other buries it so deep that it begins to speak through other means.

This is where the body enters the argument, and where I stop theorising, because I have run the experiment on myself.

Before my children were born, my body spent a year saying “that’s not fair,” and I refused to listen. I was shrinking inside my clothes. I woke three, four times a night to go to the toilet. My calves seized when I stretched in bed. Sugar soaked into my eyeballs from the outside in until my sight narrowed to a dot of focus. To each signal I applied my maturity. Tiredness meant I was working hard. The weight loss was welcome. Men slow down at thirty-five. I had spent my life avoiding fuss, and that was the problem. I had ignored my pancreas failing for over twelve months.

The blood tests ended the argument. The surgery rang the same day and sent me straight to A&E. There was so much sugar in my blood that the staff couldn’t believe I had walked in. I had come close to dying of Type 1 diabetes, and the thing that nearly killed me was not the disease. It was my discipline. I was so good at not complaining that I could not hear the complaint.

The body is much less impressed by our philosophies than we are. It does not care what we have decided to call strength, or whether our suffering fits the story we tell about ourselves. It has its own language, older than thought and harder to deceive. It does not always know the whole truth. Like a child, it can overreact, mistake discomfort for danger, sound the alarm when what is needed is patience or courage. Not every strain is injustice. But sometimes the body is the first honest witness, registering what the mind has spent months explaining away, knowing what a situation costs before we are ready to admit the price.

A certain kind of Stoicism teaches us to override these signals. Push through. Don’t whine. Other people have it worse. There is truth in some of that. Responsibility is not unfair because it is heavy. Love is not unfair because it requires sacrifice. Parenthood is not unfair because it interrupts your sleep, your plans and your ego. But some heaviness is not the weight of life. Some endurance is self-abandonment with better branding. I called mine composure while my blood was turning to syrup.

The distinction is hard to make, and it cannot be made alone. The adult and the child in us have to remain in conversation. The child says, “That’s not fair.” The adult has to ask, “What exactly do you mean?” Is this pain the price of love and work, or a signal that I am cooperating with something damaging? Am I being asked to stretch, or to disappear?

A signal is not an instruction, but it is still a signal. Pain is not always proof, but it is still information.

“Know thyself” begins in the body of the child who has noticed that something feels wrong. To know yourself is not to master yourself. It is possible to master yourself by ignoring yourself: to become disciplined and productive while losing contact with what your life is costing you. I built an identity around being the person who copes alone, and it nearly cost me the life it was organising. Self-knowledge has to be more intimate than self-control. It has to involve listening, and the humility of admitting that the parts of us we find embarrassing may still have something to say. Including the part that wants to say, with no elegance at all, “That’s not fair.”

My daughter will keep saying it. My son will too. For a while our house will be full of it. The wrong bowl. The wrong socks. The wrong amount of peanut butter. The profound moral injury of daddy doing bedtime. They will say it when they are right, and when they are not, and when the distinction is unavailable to them because they are five, or two, or human.

I will still find it exhausting. Sometimes I will say, “It is fair,” when what I mean is, “I cannot litigate this before breakfast.” But I hope I don’t train it out of them. I hope they learn proportion without indifference, resilience without numbness. And I hope they learn how to listen when some small, ancient part of them says, “That’s not fair,” and asks them not to look away.