Two Forms of Privilege

I’ve often said that it’s better to watch less news and read more books. There’s a leadership lesson in there about taking the long view, and a self-preservation element in that news is aggravating and books are denser with wisdom.

But there’s some privilege in this approach. If I can opt in or out of keeping tabs on current events, that means my life is buffered from the consequence of how something might play out. Geopolitics, elections, public health calamities are, for many, not stimulating topics for intellectual discourse but things that impinge upon very personal matters of wellness and safety. It behooves us, if we want to be empathetic people, to stay tuned, so that we can support those for whom “the news” is not some abstract social pursuit but of life-or-death consequence. Shame on us, conversely, if we are willfully oblivious, unaware of how protected we are even as we mingle with those far more vulnerable.

But there’s another form of privilege at play here as well. Having the time and emotional bandwidth to follow a news topic that isn’t of direct and immediate relevance to you is a nice thing to be able to do, but represents a luxury that others do not have, as their time and emotional bandwidth is consumed with other more immediately personal and pressing things. And so as we invariably go down the rabbit hole of news coverage begetting stress begetting the need to consume more news coverage, we are engaging in a leisure pursuit, while for others following it is no leisure pursuit, and for still others there is no leisure available to pursue it. Even worse, we act like the aggrieved victim in all this, when in fact all around us are people who are really hurting while we manufacture ourselves as the main character in a great drama in which we too are hurting.

I am guilty on both fronts almost all the time. “Check your privilege” is something that I have to do because I am privileged on so many levels. Here are two more that I have been increasingly mindful of.