the prison of privilege

i asked my public chinese school educated friend in malaysia. what he thought of international school kids. he paused for a second and then replied: “mentally ill”.

i choked on my food.

he went on to say that his life was easier in some ways because in knowing he had to make money after graduating, his options were constrained and he didn’t have to think about what to do, just how to do it. he said he felt sorry for the rich kids because it is possible to drown in choice.

his story matches my experience. the rich kids i know are almost uniformly paralysed by their privilege. in being given the chance to study what their heart desires without the grounding factor of employability, they become shaped their own desires instead of the needs of the societies they live in - like a dog chasing it’s own tail.

the kinds of jobs that privileged kids take up are often compensated in status more than money. some examples include:

• film (esoteric documentaries)

• NGO work

• design

• academia

the status gained from these careers can be:

• externally directed as a form of social signalling

• internally directed to uphold an identity one has of themselves

• used to create a parallel non-monetary measure of success thereby shielding one from questions of career progression

• used as an excuse to not do other work that is higher demand from the job market

one big problem with this is that not every rich kid is equally rich. often it took the overcoming of great odds to get kids to the point where there was wealth to squander. if you take the story of:

Generation 1: factory worker

Generation 2: accountant

Generation 3: freelance graphic designer

there’s a lot less room for error than someone with a trust fund. this is not to say that creative careers aren’t lucrative or that the people who engage in them are not aware of their riskiness but rather that the life they grew up having took a lot more luck and work than they were aware of. given the coming AI massacre it will be even more difficult.

(there’s no need for a communist revolution when it has become a norm to socialise one’s family wealth anyway)

i have been lucky to end up doing the unsexy work that potentially pays. for reasons which i will write about one day, i ended up taking a few computer science courses in university (this was just before CS popped off). almost everyone there either came from lower middle class backgrounds or had parents who were themselves programmers. it’s not that i wasn’t able to pursue my creative ambitions, it’s just that i could create a life that could support it on my own.

i think of one of my favourite malaysian authors who didn’t come from wealth, studied corporate law and wrote his first novel while he worked. for him his art was something called into the world (at great expense) rather than a lifestyle to enjoy. it is something that must be done rather than a thing to be.

i think of his story often.

notes:

• money is purifying in that it is a strong signal of what society needs. it is, of course, not always a balanced signal (economists speak of the unaccounted for negative exernalities of deforestation as an example) but it is a grounding one nonetheless