| > Does it matter? Watching everything through the myopic lens of "privilege" is wrong. May I ask why? You see it all the time, unironically: "How a 23 year old couple bought their dream home!" and it ends up in the article their parents literally paid for it. Or Bill Gates. There is the classic: "How to become as rich as Bill Gates: Choose your grandparents carefully." I see it elsewhere in this thread: "Ugh. And MY 13 year old just wants to play video games!" And that is unfair to themselves, and unfair to their kids. You see it everywhere. So many musicians, artists, writers, PEOPLE succeed in part because they just don't need to make money. Because they already have it. And then they act like it was all done themselves and while they are not bad people for having money, and they are sincerely talented, that isn't the whole story. The whole story is that they didn't ever really even need to succeed to live a comfortable life, and that is a HUGE advantage over other people. --------- Allow me to tie this to my own experience: First, I want to acknowledge that I am extremely privileged in my own ways. I grew up in a wonderful home with a great family. We were educated, and kind, and loved reading and were encouraging. The rural place I grew up in wasn't a fancy high-tech metropolis, but I did not experience any violence in my community which counts for a lot. I went to a private university on a big scholarship. It was cheaper than any state school I could have gone to. My first two years where I was in the dorms and was paying with student loans, I was very active in the student volunteer community, and the computer science club. But once I left the dorms, that was IT. I needed to 100% support myself, rent/food/etc. I spent my days working manual QA for a software company, 40/hr week, while attending school at night. And my life changed. I didn't make any new friends and lost the ones I had. I was never around for the "college stuff." Every waking moment became toil, either through work or through school. While my peers were doing research studies for natural language processing, or participating in CS contests, or building relationships, or falling in love, or actually doing well on homework and tests, or any number of productive things, I was plugging 3g WIFI dongles into and out of laptops for $15/hr. I was running test cases for 8 hours a day, then going to class from 6-9, then doing homework until I went to sleep, then getting up in the morning and doing it again. And the deficit I had in my education followed me for a LONG time. Still follows me today. So yes, I do think we should interrogate situation people were in when they achieved something. Because sometimes people don't really achieve anything other than spending their parent's money. And there are circumstances where something that seems like a big achievement was really just an inevitability. |