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’s a kind of grief we rarely speak about in Kenya—the grief that comes not from loss, but from survival. Many Kenyans know what it’s like to give up entire decades of their lives for the sake of family. We raise children who aren’t ours. We care for ageing, ailing parents when healthcare fails. We build homes from scratch while still repaying loans. We battle court cases over family land, support siblings through school, and somehow still show up to work, church, harambees, and funerals with a smile. We are excellent at pushing through pain. We endure. We provide. We hold everything together. And so we often tell ourselves: “I’ll rest when I’m done.” But what if done never comes? Even after the chaos ends—the illness, the debt, the heartbreak—we don’t rest. We move the goalpost. We chase another opportunity. We dream of new lands and new starts. We keep running, because stillness feels foreign. We are a nation that knows how to hustle, how to survive—but we don’t know how t...