If you try to walk across the desert without drinking water you will be dead in two days. That's not "the long run."
If you carry water and salt with you, you can make it a week or more, but not if you strategize poorly: walking during the day instead of at night will deplete your water much more rapidly, and if you treat your canteen carelessly you will lose the water. If you have the knowledge to navigate to places with drinkable water along the way, or the knowledge and materials to distill water from crushed plants, you can make it for months, longer if you brought food or can find it. (Me, I caught and ate raw grasshoppers.) You cannot emotionally manipulate the desert; you cannot trick it; it will not treat you more gently because you beg it for mercy. Rationality (knowledge, skill, heedfulness, and above all epistemic humility) is your only hope. It's no guarantee, because a rattlesnake or a hailstone may strike you at random, but it's your only hope.
It's not just the desert. The same is true of the ocean, of mushroom hunting, of wasp's nests, and of the frozen North with its alpine sweetvetch. Nature's ways are subtle and merciless, but they are amenable to understanding, and rationality permits you to order your life in harmony with them and thus survive and prosper a little while; though not, as you say, in the long run.
The whole world is like this, all except for tiny special contexts humans have created where the ruthless laws of Nature are suspended a little bit, where mercy and humanity and fellow-feeling hold sway.
