Perhaps one of the most overlooked privileges is not wealth itself, but having enough margin in your life to respond to reality. Over the last few years, we have become fluent in the language of privilege, speaking easily about financial privilege, pretty privilege, racial privilege, passport privilege, educational privilege and social privilege, and in doing so we have become increasingly aware that people do not all start from the same place and that some doors open more easily for some than for others. Yet there is one form of privilege that seems to receive far less attention, and that is the privilege of being able to do something with the information you have, not simply knowing, but acting, because the truth is that information alone changes very little. We like to imagine that if people only knew better, they would do better, and entire industries are built around this assumption, from self-help books and documentaries to podcasts, awareness campaigns, public health initiative...
This weekend, I watched a short lesson on learned helplessness , and it struck me how deeply it mirrors our daily lives as Kenyans — not just in politics or big systems, but in the small, ordinary spaces we occupy every day. The lecturer began with a simple exercise. Each student received a paper with scrambled letters and was told to form real words. She insisted everyone had the same set. What we didn’t know was that the first two “words” weren’t the same. One group got easy, solvable words like DOG and CAT , while the other got letter combinations that could never make sense — XQZ , PLT . As you’d expect, the first group solved theirs quickly. The second group struggled, then gave up. When the final round came, everyone had the same easy word. But by then, the second group didn’t even try. They’d already learned that effort was pointless. That is learned helplessness — when we’ve been stuck for so long that even when freedom appears, we don’t believe in it. What Is Learned He...