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If you’re someone who grew up with privilege, it can be hard to see how exactly you benefit from the world you were born into. Having privilege doesn’t mean you’re well off or you’ve never had struggles, it simply means that who you are and what you look like aren’t the cause of your struggles.
If you’re curious (and we should be!) here are 16 things that most people don’t realize are privileges.
16. Just imagine.
Having a bed.
When I was ages 8-11, my siblings and I had to sleep on the floor because we lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment. The only bed belonged to my grandfather (a 70 year old man), and the couch went to my mother (a woman with severe back problems). The rest of us had to sleep on blankets and pillows.
I remember turning twelve and finally getting to sleep in my own bed after three years of not having one. It was euphoria.
15. Relatively, anyway.
Feeling safe in your own home.
Not worrying about rats, mice, roaches, bed bugs, bricks being thrown through windows, violence outside, break ins.
14. A daily struggle.
Their health.
If they are healthy.
13. Not everyone has a safety net.
Being able to “pursue your dreams” because you have enough support systems to thrive regardless of outcome.
12. The world is not accessible.
Being able to go to a store without worrying if your wheelchair can fit through the aisles of if they have front steps.
11. You don’t realize until you’re an adult, too.
Having an emotionally mature parent.
I never envied my friends for having good moms when I was a kid, bc my mom was pretty good at managing little ones.
But now, as an adult, I’ve cried at night wishing I had a mother like (some of) my friends have.
Someone who takes care of herself and has her family’s best interests in mind. Who shows up when needed and doesn’t make things about herself. Who doesn’t lie to get her way.
Even at 37, there are moments in life when you just want to run home and climb in your parents’ bed and feel safe again.
Hard to do with the ones I’ve got.
10. No one can figure it out.
Living without constant physical pain. The idea that most people just exist without nonspecific pain is baffling to me.
It sucks. You get used to the pain, as much as one can. You begin to normalise around it. When you feel ‘good’ it’s relative to how you normally feel. “I feel good” means it’s only a little excruciating. What can really get me down, however, is knowing I’ll never really know true ‘comfort’ again. I can get relatively comfortable, but it’s only relative.
I don’t remember what true comfort felt like. I wasn’t born with a chronic pain condition, so I’ve lived a ‘normal’ existence before. But I’ve had this condition so long that I can’t remember what it was like before.
9. It’s all a game of luck.
Being healthy instead of disabled and chronically ill.
Ugh yes, although for me it’s debilitating chronic pain. I’ve had it for ten years, and at this point I can’t believe I used to live without it. That just seems like such an unattainable luxury now. I had no idea how fortunate I was. I would give anything to just feel normal again.
8. What’s in YOUR pantry?
Knowing that food is available basically at all times in first world countries.
I lived on an impoverished 3rd world island/country for about 2 years. The lack of food availability is astonishing. The only things you can always count on being at the grocery store is rum, chicken wings, rice and soybean oil.
Red meat is expensive and short supply. How many cows can an island support? Everything else is in short supply and must be imported. You can go weeks at a time without getting simple stuff like frozen broccoli or canned beans. The concept of returns or regulations dont exist either. They totally sell expired milk and dairy products. If you arent observant enough to check that is your bad.
There is no FDA so the quality of meat is low. The only way to get a good chicken is to buy and carve it yourself. Buying individual cuts at the grocery store is a no no. They pump all kinds of solution into the breasts and thighs to make them weigh more. “Hydrolized proteins”, sugar and a whole bunch of other stuff they dont legally have to disclose. It has a horrid after taste. I had to befriend a farmer who would sell my chickens by the bird and I would then carve them up myself and feed the carcasses to the street dogs. Trash pick up is also a 1st world luxury.
The government drops off a dumpsters in random places one day a week. Its your job to get your trash to one on the correct day. This means you often have to freeze your trash or feed it to street dogs, because it will rot in your trash. Roaches will smell it and come up your drains (In the US we have the luxury of drain nets at the bottom of our pipes so sewer roaches dont crawl up them; not the case in other countries. The most annoying is mail. Mail delivery is a 1st world luxury.
The island I lived on the streets don’t have names and buildings don’t have numbers. You had to drive to the only post office in the capital and not only was shipping expensive you have to bribe the post office workers to give you your mail or they will claim it isn’t there. Electronic payment doesn’t really exist. Everything is cash based. ATM is broken 50% of the time so when it works you have to pull out all three cash you can. Very few businesses have credit card machines and often half the time they aren’t working. Paying bills was the most awful. No electronic payment. You go to the electric company and wait in one line to get your bill and then you wait in a second line to pay your bill with cash. You better have small Bill’s. If you only have big Bill’s there is a chance they will lie and say they dont have change and they can pocket it all.
If you have $400 east Caribbean but the electric bill is $350 you just have to absorb the $50 loss or get out of line, get change, and then wait in line again to pay. Awful life.
I was a soldier who fought in Afghanistan. We had a better diet there than the people on that island. The US government did a decent job providing beef and fish for us in a land locked country. We got our mail regularly and fairly fast too. Sorry for my extended rant. I hated that island. Made me so thankful I was American.
7. It’s just an awful hand to be dealt.
Having a family that loves you. I grew up in a pretty loving family. It was somewhat dysfunctional, to be sure, but my mother loves me as does my sister. So did my grandparents. We were always a close family and we helped each other when possible. We were always supportive too.
I went to school with people whose parents couldn’t have given a f*ck less about them. I mean straight up, just didn’t give a sh%t if their kids lived or died. If your parents actively tried to keep you off drugs and off the streets and were emotionally supportive and not abusive, count your blessings.
It’s a f*cked up world we live in and plenty of people are trying to navigate it completely alone.
6. Or just whenever you want one.
A hot shower every day.
I’ve been living in my car for a bit now and fuck I want a hot shower all the time, it’s a once a week luxury for me.
5. It’s so formative.
Just having a stable home situation.
I grew up in a stable home, with my parents caring a lot about us and not much issues with regards to family.
My girlfriend however grew up in a family that was always fighting with each other.
So even though her parents loved her, she hated being home, since it was always hectic. Even now she has poor relations with her parents and the rest of her family, because the conversation in her family is always about family issues.
Really puts into perspective how different a home situation can be, even when the home itself isn’t that bad.
4. How strange it seems to some.
Being in countries where you are able to speak insults to, openly criticize or question authority without going to jail.
3. They should be human rights, but…
24-7-365 of the following:
Clean, drinking water
Heated water
Heated/cooled indoors
Electricity
FoodMore people have died from unsafe water and poor sanitation in the past 100 yrs than of any other cause. Unsanitary water is the most preventable of the major causes of death in the world.
2. It changes everything.
Being mentally healthy. Basically, my childhood was such that as an adult I have an overactive amygdala – the part of the brain that handles strong emotions and instincts like fight/flight. I’ve learned that if you chronically feel unsafe during your formative years, the amygdala forms more connections to the rest of your brain, and literally gets bigger to increase its processing power.
Since I had been like this for my whole life, it was just normal for me. Normal to have very strong instinctive responses to danger or conflict, and to always be dwelling on worst-case scenarios, for example. As I’ve gotten treatment and medication, and as my situation has gotten better, I’ve had quite a few ‘whoa’ moments where it really hits me that this is how a lot of people naturally see the world.
No constant yammering of negative thoughts and emotions, no quiet dread that someone means me harm, or my life is about to fall apart. I still have a long way to go, but I definitely find myself sometimes thinking ‘oh, so this is what ‘normal’ is supposed to feel like!’
1. Good sleep is everything.
Sleeping through the night.
Didn’t think of this one at first but knowing how difficult life is when you don’t get enough sleep I couldn’t agree more. I actually knew a guy that got fatal insomnia in high-school. I couldn’t imagine having it.
Consider our eyes opened, y’all – there’s no going back now!
What else would you add to this list? Let’s keep learning in the comments.
