I am often struck by the shortsightedness of some people when it comes to their own lives, whether successful or unsuccessful by the standards contemporary societies insist on valuing. I am referring to the arrogance of those who proclaim, for anyone willing to listen, that they are entirely self-made, that success is the exclusive result of their own effort and dedication.
The opposite reasoning circulates with equal force: all the bad luck accumulated by those who were not fortunate enough to be born into privilege is blamed on the world or on others. Circumstances shape everyone, some with more advantages, others with fewer, and rarely does anyone stop to look at this directly.
The other day, I watched a video about meritocracy that dismantled the notion that everyone has the same twenty-four hours and that this alone explains why some succeed and others do not. What nonsense to believe that. It portrayed an obstacle race where some participants began several meters ahead, with fewer barriers to overcome. The arrogance of certain successful people - watch a few videos of Silicon Valley tech bros and you will see what I mean - borders on absurdity.
Think of Elon Musk, who likes to present himself as the genius who built everything from nothing. What rarely appears in the narrative is that he grew up in a wealthy family in South Africa, that his father owned an emerald mine, and that he arrived in the United States with enough money to study and take risks. Talent exists, no doubt. The springboard existed too, and it was made of gold.
No one accomplishes anything entirely alone. We are born dependent on care for years, far longer than most species. A human child takes nearly two decades to achieve any real autonomy and, even then, depends on an invisible network of support: public or private schools, safe or unsafe neighborhoods, access to healthcare, nutrition, affection. Some arrive in the world already carrying every possible disadvantage, while others avoid most of them without even noticing. The lottery happens before birth, when we emerge in a particular country, family, or postal code.
The video I mentioned, which has circulated for years and which you can test for yourself, captures this brutally. You place several people at a starting line and begin asking questions. Did your parents go to college? Take two steps forward. Did you never have to worry about your next meal as a child? Two steps forward. Did you grow up with both parents present? Two steps forward. Did you have access to tutoring, academic support, internet at home? Two steps forward. By the time the race begins, some are already near the finish line, and yet those left behind are still told the problem is a lack of effort.
This has a name: privilege. Privilege is not an insult; it is simply the honest description of an advantage you did not ask for and likely did not choose. Being born in Brazil like I am, is already a privilege compared to being born in Yemen or the Central African Republic, between Cameroon and South Sudan, where life expectancy barely surpasses fifty-five years and war, drought, and famine are not distant headlines but everyday reality. Being born in São Paulo is already a privilege compared to being born in certain regions of Maranhão, in the northside, where infant mortality still carries numbers that should shame any government.
If you have read this far, you are already among the privileged. You are reading this text on the screen of a phone, tablet, or computer, with enough time to reflect on philosophy and meritocracy - which alone places you in a relatively small fraction of humanity. According to data from the World Bank, hundreds of millions of people still live in extreme poverty, and billions remain below higher-income thresholds. We are not in Gaza, in Ukraine, or in some forgotten country where children die from diseases we eliminated decades ago with a simple vaccine.
When this realization settles in deeply, something changes. A form of compassion emerges that goes beyond empathy - a visceral understanding that the life you have is radically different, and in many ways better, than the lives of a vast portion of humanity, in ways you rarely enumerate or even notice.
Compassion here carries weight: it is the capacity to feel with another person without having lived the same experience, the recognition that if you had been born in the wrong place, to the wrong parents, in the wrong country, you would be entirely different. With that comes gratitude, which is something altogether different from guilt or pity.
Gratitude is an act of lucidity, seeing clearly what you received that was never guaranteed. It is not the performative gratitude of motivational posts.
It is the silence of someone who looks at their own life and recognizes the extent of what was given before any personal effort ever began.
But there is a deeper layer still, and it emerges when you take the question seriously: if circumstances shape us all, if the language in which you think came from outside you, if the values you carry were deposited in you before you had any voice in the matter, if the way you process risk, ambition, and affection was molded by forces preceding any conscious choice, then where, exactly, does the “I” that claims merit begin?
When you sit with this question sincerely, without rushing to answer, what you find is continuity rather than a clear border between yourself and what formed you. What you call “your” life carries what the world was before you existed: your parents’ choices, historical accidents, geography, the body you received without asking. The separation between you and your circumstances is real enough to function in daily life and subtle enough to dissolve under close examination.
Gratitude, seen from this angle, takes on another dimension. You realize that what you call “your” life was never entirely yours, that you are — to some degree the ego always resists admitting — an expression of the whole that composed you. Compassion for others ceases to be virtue or moral effort and becomes direct recognition: what separates you from someone born with less is thinner than the narrative of individual merit can sustain. And it never will.
You and the circumstances that shaped you were never separate enough for the credit to belong only to you.
“Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
The Dude