Is life fair? Only a quarter of Brits think it is

The ice cream you dropped as a kid, the balloon that flew away, the pet sent away on a “special holiday” never to return, the mate who cancelled on you by saying they were sick before being tagged in a photo out with other people: life is very obviously not fair.

Now new research from YouGov seems to support this pessimistic truth, with only 25% of Brits thinking life is fair compared to 59% who don’t. 16% “don’t know”, which suggests they haven’t really been paying much attention to their own existence.

And Brits, not known for their especially sunny dispositions or endless optimism, are unsurprisingly far less optimistic about life than their American pals. Nearly 40% of Americans (38%) think life is fair compared to 46% who don’t. 

There seems to be a political divide, too – Tory voters are much more likely to say they think life is fair, presumably because they all own fourteen acres of ancestral land. Scottish people and Labour voters are the most likely to say life is unfair at 63%, with UKIP voters and Londoners behind them on 61%. 

We Brits do have one thing going for us, though, even if we’re constantly being tested by life’s cruel forces: we’re much more likely to think life should be fair than Americans. 71% of British people say life should be fair compared to 63% of Americans. They can take literally all of our optimism, but they’ll never take our misguided hope for a better world that will never come to fruition!