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...
There is a line I heard in a song that has been following me around: “But even lies come dressed in effort sometimes.” At first, I thought it was about other people — the obvious place to start. The relationships that felt convincing because someone tried. The situations that lasted longer than they should have because effort was being expended. But the longer the line stayed with me, the more it turned inward. Because the most exhausting lies are not always the ones we tell others. They are the ones we keep up with ourselves. There are versions of our lives that require constant upkeep. Narratives we repeat so often they begin to sound like truth. Not because they are, but because abandoning them would mean admitting something uncomfortable: that we settled, that we stayed too long, that we chose safety over honesty, or familiarity over alignment. Those admissions cost more than the effort of maintaining the lie. So we try. We show up. We perform consistency. We add small acts o...