From our other sites
The story
A thread that kicked off with posts like “Living honestly is starting to feel pointless” and “Don’t bad people actually have better lives?” sparked heated debate on the Gaming Hardware (Geha) board. Some argued that people who turn to wrongdoing have more options and reap more rewards precisely because they’re not bound by the law, though they tend to make enemies and often end up miserable in their later years. Others pointed out that we only ever notice the “bad guys” who succeeded — the ones who failed and got caught simply vanish from view, so there’s a survivorship bias at play. The discussion also exposed differing views on just what laws and police are actually for, raising point after point that couldn’t be reduced to a simple good-versus-evil binary.
What people said
Going out of your way to make a crappy thread like this…
I'd say that already makes you plenty bad enough
And "living honestly" is just your own subjective take anyway.
Bad guys are just living earnestly in their own way too — they just happen to commit crimes while doing it. Not that different from you, really
The delinquents from school usually dropped out after junior high, hung around the neighborhood, and then you lose track of them around the time they get arrested.
And if you actually know a "successful" bad guy personally, aren't you already one yourself?
You're old, bedridden, hospitalized, pain shooting through your whole body — and you're about to go under the knife for the surgery that's supposed to finally end it.
And here's the twist: you are the one performing the surgery on yourself. If your worldview is "making money matters most," or "work is just how I earn a living," or "it's fine to be bad at your job as long as you put your heart into it" — then that's exactly the kind of doctor who shows up for you
>"it's fine to be bad at your job as long as you put your heart into it"
Being bad at it is the one thing that's absolutely not okay.
I'll let the rest slide though
How many times do I have to SAY this—
Stop making threads without a source!!
I tell you this every single time, you piece of trash!!!!!
But OP's an idiot — there's no way he could pull that off
Though I guess being able to make money on YouTube too is part of the problem
They'd just collapse on their own — no need to even arrest them
But that only works as long as there are victims to exploit — once you've drained them all dry, you're stuck
And even short of calling someone a full-on "bad guy," people who have no problem lying or who play dirty do tend to come out ahead a lot of the time.
But if you're fundamentally an honest person, doing something bad eats away at you, and lying leaves you regretting it forever.
It's a tough one.
Though for what it's worth, the kind of airheaded idiots who fall for anything and become instant true believers tend to be pretty happy too, in their own way
True believers don't have to overthink anything — they just follow the doctrine faithfully.
Monotheistic religions especially don't factor in anyone else's circumstances
✗: Living honestly
✓: Living without thinking, just doing what you're told
That's what's really going on with OP.
He's just blaming others for his own life not working out
I could never do it myself — the guilt would crush me.
"Everyone else is doing it too" doesn't factor into it at all.
The fact that you could even think that way means you're already a bad guy
True, if you're living a normal life you'd think you'd understand what's off-limits.
Some people go their whole lives without touching alcohol, so when someone deliberately drinks and wrecks their own life over it, I honestly think that belongs in the same category as drugs.
Just banning alcohol would definitely make the world at least a little saner
The cops barely bother moving on it.
Heck, they won't even accept the police report half the time.
Honestly, in Japan right now, whoever just does it wins
And somewhere out there, some idiot who thought exactly that is getting arrested today, too.
"I'll be fine" is a mindset the scammers themselves have as well.
A lot of people live honestly precisely because they don't want to end up being that kind of idiot
Stuff created by upstanding, virtuous types is seriously boring
Scumbags live honestly with themselves, to put it kindly — or selfishly, to put it bluntly — so their real feelings tend to leak straight into their work.
People of good character, on the other hand, are just skilled at hiding their true feelings and keeping them in check through reason.
Though these days even rock musicians are out there advertising how anti-drug and clean-living they are, so scumbags increasingly only get support from other scumbags.
Even artists and creators are now expected to stay "compliant" with social norms
As long as criminals are scared of the police, the system is working just fine
Laws can only define good and evil down to the lowest common denominator.
Rules alone can't guarantee anything beyond that, which is why we have a justice system — a mechanism that includes human judgment in how it's actually applied
There are at least seven things wrong with that
The amount of effort involved is just completely different to begin with.
Successful people, without exception, put in an insane amount of effort.
A lazy bum has no shot at success
Exactly right.
What OP's saying is basically like claiming Masayoshi Son or Bill Gates just had life way too easy — it skips over the entire process they went through.
If you're only envying the end result, good and evil don't even enter into it
You'd have to judge everyone who comes near you purely by their usefulness to you, and live in constant paranoia
To begin with, everyone is always living on the sacrifice of others, whether they mean to or not.
And even among intentional sacrifices, there are layers to it — whether it's for your own life, your family's life, basic survival, or just plain pleasure, it varies a lot.
Framing things purely in terms of good and evil is difficult to begin with. Ethical standards differ from person to person, and if you draw the line at "obeys the law vs. doesn't," almost everyone has broken some law or another
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The “honest people get the short end of the stick” style of argument is a theme that resurfaces online every time a corporate scandal or a politician’s misconduct makes the news, and this thread is no exception. That said, as pointed out within the thread itself, this kind of argument has a structural blind spot. The “bad guys” whose lives worked out stand out and get noticed, but the people who did the same things and ended up failing, getting arrested, or ruined simply disappear from view — a selection bias (comments 11, 15). There’s also a misunderstanding embedded in the counterargument that “it’s strange for bad guys to come out ahead when police and laws exist.” As comments 50 and 52 touch on, law and the justice system aren’t devices built to completely eradicate wrongdoing — they function purely as a deterrent, and the mere existence of bad guys who don’t get caught doesn’t by itself mean the system is contradictory. The core of where opinions split in this thread is that it conflates morality with gain and loss, when in reality multiple separate factors — effort, luck, and how the law actually gets enforced in practice — are all tangled together.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware & Industry (Geha)) thread “[Sad News] Sorry, but isn’t it true that “bad guys” have it better in life??“.
Leave a Reply