In a documentary podcast I’ve been listening to, the narrator recently described her problems as the problems of a privileged person. (She is, at this point in the story, attempting to make a living on the podcast alone; she has quit her job and used up her savings, maxed out her credit card, and still the ad revenue from the podcast has not risen to an amount that gets anywhere near paying the rent, let alone her daughter’s childcare. She is taking a break from the podcast and has asked her dad for money, and is exhausted.) She (and not to be mysterious: it’s Sophie Harper in Not by Accident) did not use the phrase “first-world problems,” but what she said reminded me of that phrase, and made me think again about privilege and how I can relate to mine in a healthy way.
Something bothers me about the phrase “first-world problems.” One thing that bothers me is that it points out that I spend a lot of time making a big fuss about things that are ludicrously less serious than the difficulties with which the majority of the world’s population deals on an everyday basis. That is a fair and healthy discomfort, and no reason to discontinue using the phrase. But there is something more.
At one point in grad school, I lived in the narrow upstairs bedroom of a five-bedroom house on Trinity Street. My room was directly above the front porch, and roughly the same size and shape, with a long row of high square windows facing south and into an endless-looking willow oak that housed hoot owls. It cost me $250 a month; I paid my whole first semester’s rent by selling art at a big show in Portland before I left. I put a dresser on the landing outside. A desk fit inside. In order not to clutter the room with a bed, I put a double-thickness air mattress in the narrow walk-in closet (it just fit, with a bit of a pinch at the middle where a support beam came down). On the first night I got off my airport shuttle and awkwardly met my housemates before heading upstairs to bed. I got into my minimal pajamas (North Carolina in August without air conditioning) and inflated the air mattress. As I opened the closet door to crawl in, a large roach dropped from the door frame and ran down my shoulder.
There were no roaches after that first one. But I was sitting on that same air mattress with the closet door open, on a Saturday afternoon, when I had an important conversation with my friend Theresa about pain. She grew up in South Africa and had a rough childhood (as everyone I know from there did). I was talking about the things I was learning about slavery in one of my divinity school classes, and about the ways it reminded me of learning about the Third Reich in tenth grade history class, in Germany. My suffering seemed simply irrelevant in the face of genocide. Or even famine or plague or poverty. What did it matter if I had insomnia? Or was lonely? Or struggling to work out relationships with my family?
“I don’t think,” Theresa said, “that pain works that way. I think that pain sort of fills up all the space available.” She paused. “I mean, I’m working right now for this family down the street who just had twins. And they are SO overwhelmed. Both the parents. One newborn is a wild ride, but two of them at once—and then they wake each other up when they cry—and you have to feed two, and change two, and don’t have enough arms. And—well, the thing is, I don’t think that the presence of any other suffering anywhere else in the world really changes that. You know?” Then she talked about a book she’d been reading, one of Frederick Buechner’s, that talked about “stewarding your pain.” As though pain is a resource, something that must not be wasted. She said this was changing the way she relates to her own pain. “It doesn’t do anyone any good—not even the descendants of holocaust survivors, or of African slaves—for you to sit around telling yourself your life has become irrelevant in the face of the magnitude of their suffering. What you need to do is be you. It’s the only way you can do anything worthwhile in the world. It’s the only way you can actually see or respond to their pain. Being you means doing the work of your pain, rather than going around avoiding the work by telling yourself your pain doesn’t matter.”
The phrase “first-world problems” has the effect, for me, of compressing two different sets of things together that do not belong together. One set is my mundane and insignificant annoyances, which grow out of being accustomed to a standard of living that is, by historical and global standards, absurd. The other set is my actual pain. It is useful to compare my inconveniences to the struggles of others because it gives me perspective and may convince me not to complain foolishly. But it is not useful to compare my pain or suffering to other people’s pain; in fact it is a misunderstanding of what pain and suffering are. Pain happens to human beings, to all of them and in ways that do not in the end vary much. Privilege protects you from some kinds of pain (you’ll get better medical treatments, for example, and are less likely to lose family members to disease). But it does not remove the pain you experience if someone you love does die. When someone you love does die. Privilege may give you space to do your grieving without having to struggle to keep yourself or your children alive. But it does not do your grieving for you. And you do the world no service at all if you avoid doing your own grieving because right now, in a war zone somewhere, someone cannot stop to grieve because he or she is being shot at.
There are first-world inconveniences. But there is only one-world pain.