Ever notice how the people who insist they "worked for everything they have" often started on third base?
Picture a coffee shop in Saigon a few years back. Two expats are deep in conversation. One is complaining about how the locals "just don't have the same work ethic" while sipping his $6 latte in a country where that's more than many people make in a day.
The irony is completely lost on him.
That kind of moment sticks with a person because it reveals something uncomfortable — something many people recognize in themselves only after stepping outside their own context. Someone who grew up working-class in Melbourne, for instance, might genuinely believe they understand struggle. Their parents worked hard. They took a warehouse job shifting TVs to make ends meet.
But living between Vietnam and Singapore has a way of teaching profound lessons about privilege that can't be seen from the inside. The more advantages a person has, the harder it becomes to recognize them as advantages at all.
The invisibility of our own advantages
Think about fish not knowing they're in water. When something surrounds you completely, you stop noticing it exists.
Privilege works the same way. When you've always had clean drinking water from the tap, you don't think about it as a luxury. When you've always had access to education, you assume everyone who doesn't succeed simply didn't try hard enough.
It's easy to believe a university degree is purely the result of personal effort. And sure, studying hard matters. But it also helps to have parents who valued education, a stable home to study in, and enough food that hunger never became a distraction from the books.
In Vietnam, there are families where brilliant kids drop out of school at 14 to work because their family needs the income. Not because they lack ambition. Not because they don't value education. But because survival comes first.
The bootstrap myth
People love stories about those who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. They make the world feel fair and merit-based.
But here's what gets missed: not everyone even has boots.
Buddhist philosophy teaches about interconnectedness. Nothing exists in isolation. Every success story is built on a foundation of countless factors, most of which no one had any control over.
Your success isn't just about your hard work. It's also about the country you were born in, the color of your skin, your gender, your health, your family's economic status, the quality of schools in your area, and a thousand other variables you never chose.
The more of these advantages align in your favor, the more "normal" they seem. You start believing everyone has the same starting line.
Why success makes us blind
There's a psychological phenomenon called the fundamental attribution error. People tend to attribute their own successes to internal factors (talent, effort) while attributing their failures to external factors (bad luck, unfair circumstances).
With other people, the script flips. Their failures? Must be personal shortcomings. Their successes? They got lucky.
The more successful someone becomes, the more they reinforce the belief that they earned it all themselves. Each achievement adds another layer of confirmation bias. They worked hard and succeeded, therefore hard work must be the primary factor in success.
But what about all the people who worked just as hard and didn't make it?
In Saigon, street vendors wake up at 4 AM and work until midnight, seven days a week. They work harder than most professionals in wealthy countries ever will. The difference isn't effort. It's opportunity.
The comfort of not knowing
Here's an uncomfortable truth: recognizing your privilege feels terrible.
It means admitting that your achievements aren't entirely your own. It means acknowledging that the world isn't fair. It means sitting with the discomfort of having advantages others don't.
So people create stories to avoid this discomfort. They focus on the obstacles they did face (and everyone faces some) while minimizing the advantages they had. They point to examples of people who succeeded despite tremendous disadvantages as proof that anyone can make it.
But using exceptional cases to justify systemic inequalities is like using lottery winners to prove that buying tickets is a solid retirement plan.
Breaking through the bubble
How do you see water when you're a fish? You have to experience air.
For many people, moving to Southeast Asia serves as that experience of air. Suddenly, advantages that were never noticed become visible. The power of a certain passport. The economic value of being a native English speaker. The doors that open simply because of where someone came from.
You don't have to move across the world to gain this perspective, though. You can actively seek out stories and experiences outside your bubble. Read books by authors from different backgrounds. Travel if you can, but travel to learn, not to confirm what you already believe.
Most importantly, when someone from a less privileged background shares their experience, resist the urge to immediately counter with your own struggles. Just listen. Sit with the discomfort of not relating.
The ego problem
Buddhism teaches that suffering comes from attachment, particularly attachment to the ego. The idea that anyone is self-made, that they've earned everything through their own merit, is perhaps the ultimate ego attachment.
Letting go of ego doesn't diminish a person. It connects them more deeply to others and to reality itself.
Acknowledging privilege isn't about guilt or self-flagellation. It's about clarity — seeing the full picture of how any individual life came to be, and using that understanding to build a more honest relationship with the world.
