Letter to the stranger 296 days later.

Today, while walking around a shopping mall, I saw two young girls who looked roughly the same age, perhaps around nineteen. There was nothing particularly extraordinary about either of them, yet the contrast between their lives—or at least what I imagined their lives to be—stayed with me.

One was well dressed. Her skin looked cared for, her clothes were expensive, and there was a certain relaxation in the way she walked around. The other was walking through the same mall carrying children’s balloons, apparently trying to sell them.

Of course, I know nothing about either of them.

Perhaps everything I assumed was wrong. I don’t know who their parents are, how much money they have, what difficulties they have experienced, or even whether the girl selling balloons actually needed the money for herself. They are assumptions based on a few seconds of observation.

But the assumptions are not really the point. The image triggered a question in me that I have thought about many times before:

Is life fair?

No. Life is not fair, and it will never be.

If I mentally removed the clothes, the quality of the skin, the relaxation of one and the visible struggle in the eyes of the other, I was simply looking at two young human beings who seemed like equals. Yet, assuming my interpretation was approximately correct, one was probably thinking about what she would do socially that day while consuming capital provided by her family. The other was spending those same hours trying to generate enough money to meet today’s expenses.

But there is an important distinction here.

This is not a fuck the rich argument, nor is it an argument against wealth itself. There is nothing inherently wrong with that young woman enjoying the advantages her family may have provided her. She did not choose the circumstances into which she was born any more than the girl selling balloons chose hers. If her parents worked to give their daughter a comfortable life, enjoying that life does not make her guilty of anything.

And suffering does not confer moral superiority either. The girl selling balloons is not a better human being simply because her life may be harder. Poverty is not virtue, just as wealth is not vice.

That would merely replace one shallow class distinction with another.

The point is almost the opposite: neither person’s economic circumstances tell us very much about their worth as a human being. One should not be blamed for being fortunate, and the other should not be diminished for being unfortunate. The interesting question is why circumstances over which neither had meaningful control can produce such radically different experiences of the same world.

If anything, recognizing the role of circumstance should make us slower to judge both of them.

At nineteen, particularly in a country where creating meaningful capital at that age is extremely difficult, the difference between those lives is unlikely to be explained simply by the choices those two people have made.

And I cannot contemplate this honestly without applying the same reasoning to myself.

I was lucky financially. I was born into a family where my father had already created resources and opportunities for me. I did not create the initial capital from which I benefited.

There is effort that I put into that capital today, and there is a sense in me that I want to earn what my father will eventually leave behind. I want to transform it, secure it and create something meaningful from it. I have met people with similar or greater financial advantages who, knowing that their futures were already economically secure, chose much easier paths.

I chose differently.

The university I attended, the subjects I study, the conversations I seek, the questions I spend my time contemplating and the angle from which I try to understand life are things I have consciously pursued. Economically, my contribution to my starting position is limited. But manevi—in meaning, character, intellectual development and what I choose to construct from the life I received—I want my contribution to be much greater.

Perhaps that is what someone born fortunate can actually earn.

Not the circumstances themselves, but what they do with them.

Does being fortunate therefore create an obligation to help those who weren’t?

Not automatically. But I find it difficult to imagine someone possessing the ethical principles I believe in, genuinely understanding how arbitrary many of our starting conditions are, and then never looking toward those who were disadvantaged by circumstances they never chose.

That does not mean I think every person who struggles is merely a victim of circumstance. Choices matter. A person who repeatedly misuses opportunities and someone who never received those opportunities are not the same.

But poor choices do not make someone cease to be human either.

There is a Turkish expression, “gördüğün günden geri kalmak”—to fall behind the life you once knew. Someone who has always lived without comfort suffers from deprivation. Someone who once knew comfort and lost it experiences another kind of suffering. Responsibility matters, but suffering remains suffering.

The more difficult question is what helping someone actually means.

I don’t believe taking someone who is accustomed to the cold, giving them a warm blanket for one night, and returning them to the cold the following morning necessarily constitutes goodness. Sometimes it may be necessary; immediate suffering is real. But if that is the entirety of our intervention, we should at least question whom the gesture ultimately served.

There is an old idea about teaching someone how to fish rather than continuously giving them fish. It survives because there is something fundamentally correct about it.

Consistency of balanced comfort is far better than inconsistent luxury.

If I can help someone, I would rather change their trajectory.

Education. Employment. Capital. Mentorship. A connection. An opportunity. Something that changes what becomes possible afterward.

Then comes an almost impossible question: whom?

Who deserves that opportunity most?

The poorest? The smartest? The hardest-working? The person with the greatest potential? The person with the best character? The person for whom your intervention produces the greatest return?

I think there is a point at which trying to answer this perfectly becomes counterproductive.

Searching endlessly for the 100% perfect candidate can make you walk past countless people who were 40%, 60% or 70% of whatever imaginary perfection you constructed.

Saving one person is saving one person.

The criteria never end. At some point, if your judgment tells you this is the person, perhaps you simply have to act.

And if it works, I don’t principally want that person to repay me. I want them to understand why it was done.

Then, if one day they possess the ability to change another person’s trajectory, perhaps they will do the same. And perhaps that person eventually does it for another.

A chain.

I would be lying if I said I don’t want to be remembered. I do.

But wanting something does not change what is reality.

No one will be eternally remembered. Eventually my name will disappear, as will almost every name that has ever existed. What seems capable of surviving much longer is a principle transmitted through behavior: someone once opened a door for me when they didn’t have to, so when I became capable of doing the same, I opened a door for somebody else.

And perhaps they teach their children the same thing.

If I could tell the girl selling balloons only one thing, however, it wouldn’t be that somebody will eventually rescue her. It wouldn’t be that hard work guarantees wealth. And it wouldn’t be that life eventually becomes fair.

I don’t believe any of those things can honestly be promised.

I would tell her:

Life is not fair, and it will never be.

The most durable response I have found is to develop the ability to say, “No matter what my situation is, I will find something in this moment that I can enjoy.”

Because changing someone’s external circumstances can take years. Sometimes they may never change in the way we hope. If our permission to experience life is continuously postponed until life becomes fair, we may postpone living forever.

Perhaps, then, there are two responsibilities moving in opposite directions.

When looking at another person’s life, try to change the circumstances that unnecessarily limit them.

When looking at your own life, don’t wait for perfect circumstances before allowing yourself to live it.

When I was younger, I often wondered what would make a life feel achieved when looking backward from its end.

My answer today is surprisingly simple.

I want many moments to come to mind that make me smile.

And I want many of those memories to be of people living better lives because something I did changed what was possible for them.

I intend to secure the future of my children. But beyond what is necessary for that, I would like much of the personal wealth I accumulate during my lifetime eventually to serve this purpose. More importantly, I want to teach my children the same principle.

Perhaps they will teach theirs.

The money itself is not the legacy.

The chain is.

Farewell.