You Poor People Think You Have It Rough? Living A Privileged Life Is More Difficult Than It Sounds.

My life isn’t perfect, but it’s as close as you can get.

Born into a family that loved me, I was private school educated my whole life, with great friends and parents who always supported me. I never had to worry about money, never worried about employment, college tuition fees, friends that forgot about me, or parents that didn’t love me. I had and still have it all, lucky me right? Except, I don’t feel that way.

Inside there has always been a sort of yearning for something more, some accomplishment, some answer that I can give when someone asks me what I am proud of. An answer that isn’t as pathetic as “I haven’t accomplished anything above menial status to be proud of because I have never needed to accomplish anything I was not given.”

I never had to work my way through school, never had to worry about the cost of anything. My parents have given me everything I could ever want and then more, but because I never had to struggle, I never felt satisfied.

To this day I don’t know what it’s like to feel proud of a great feat you’ve accomplished, to be happy with the person you’ve become because you have struggled and survived, fought and prospered. Throughout my life I have met so many amazing, inspiring, happy people who have been through hell and back and never fail to be grateful, thankful, satisfied with who they are and what they have.

It is in contrast to these people that I feel my life has come up shallow, hollow in comparison. I’m a happy person, but some days I feel like I don’t deserve the right; as if there was some test everyone else had to go through that I somehow missed and now I’ll never know if I’m good enough.

There are days where I feel upset, disappointed that I never had hard trials to face, never got a chance to test my character, prove to myself that I was strong, capable, and independent. I know it seems pathetic, that my biggest worry is that I don’t have any big worries but now, in my best attempt to rationalize my concern I have come up with a theory. Maybe it is just to justify my lucky life and seemingly irrational contempt of it, but it seems to work all the same.

People have often told me that I don’t understand what reality is, because I have never had to face it and in their words “have been in a bubble my whole life.” But what is reality?

The reality is that most kids have to work to buy the things they want.

The reality is that most people cannot afford college.

The reality is that some people have to work to make ends meet.

The reality is some people cannot make ends meet.

Any of those sound familiar?

But then that’s just mostly the Western Worlds concerns isn’t it?

Is that the reality were talking about?

What about the rest of the world?

What about Malawi?

What about the Congo?

What about those people? How can you tell me that you know what reality is anymore than I do in contrast to the rest of the world? You don’t. I don’t. Reality is relative to your surroundings, and some are just luckier than others. You can’t change what you were born into but you can strive to help those that deserve more, that weren’t so lucky, and maybe that’s it; the key to satisfying the hollowness that comes from my worry free life.

That’s the theory that I am running with these days, except implementation is much harder than creation. I’m working on it, but I can’t say that I’ve been very successful because well, I’ve never had to be.