The toughest part of being privileged is having no money

The hardest part of accepting your privilege – and believe me, I do – is being poor AF.

Not actually poor, you understand – in the grand scheme of things, I’m rich as hell and grateful for it. But it is certainly possible to be lifestyle rich and cash poor.

You can have a dope-ass two-bed unit in a sweet complex in a smart suburb, kids at a good school, a job that many would dream about, decent car, fibre to the home… all of that, but no actual money!

Some of you may understand what I mean. You are blessed with a decent income, but by the time the bills have been paid and you’ve taken your kid to Spur, you are left trying to make R800 last three weeks.

For some of that, I blame the pandemic. Costs went up, income went down, and life just got hard. Thank god for working from home, though, because I’m not sure I would be able to afford the commute.

At least when I’m working from the lounge, I’m able to survive on toast and Ricoffy, and massive pots of rice and lentils.

Entertainment is the province of Netflix and YouTube, walks in the park and runs around the block.

Keeping kids occupied? Well, besides the park, TikTok and Netflix till it’s coming out of our ears, we’ve had a couple of pleasant afternoons of window-shopping at Sandton City. This is another modern paradox of mildly enjoyable cruelty, walking that delicate tightrope of showing your child awesome stuff while not allowing them to have anyone of it.

And the worst part of all of this, is that every minute of our slight inconvenience is still a tastelessly, immoral insult to the majority of our population forced to live in inhuman conditions on the outskirts of our nation’s cities.

The suffering of our countrymen and women is clear from the fact that every single traffic light between my flat and Sandton city is patrolled by between 1 and 10 poor people hustling to find money for food, to live, to survive.

It’s offensive that people should be forced to do this to get by. And even more offensive that I have to say no to every single one of those people, every single day.

You can blame the pandemic for some of our difficulties, but the structural inequality has been with us for hundreds of years.

It’s one of the screaming ironies of our fundamentally unjust economy that you can have unseemly wealth – the fruits of centuries of exploitation alongside the most indigent poverty – and still, barely anyone has any cash on them.

My privilege is unmistakable, but there is a relative fluctuation, and sometimes, even in your blessed state, you feel poor. You have to feed your child the same leftovers again, from the same pot; you don’t leave home for an entire weekend; you put haircuts on the backburner.

Today, on my cost-effective evening walk around the block, I passed a group of people and caught a snatch of their conversation. “… of course, our economy is in the hands of these guys…” and he gestured towards me, as I walked past. I was simply the nearest white person the person could use, to demonstrate his point.

I continued on my way, returning to my rented flat. It was dinner time. On Netflix, we’re just finishing off Atypical. I hung up the washing and did the dishes. Then I fished a couple of frozen pizzas from the freezer and began to prepare dinner.

It was a prosaic, basic evening, in a prosaic, basic life. But in South Africa, this is what privilege looks like. We are the lucky ones.