Richard Hammond, of Top Gear fame, has been bringing his daughter Izzy onto the DriveTribe YouTube channel, and now she is a full fledged car-tuber in her own right.
In a recent interview, when asked how she reacts to accusations of nepotism, she shrugged it off.
“What do you want me to do? Do you want me to stop? I don’t think that’s going to solve anything. I know how lucky I am. I KNOW how lucky I am to have been born into the world I’ve been born into, and I’m incredibly grateful for that… My dad talks about the luck thing all the time. It was luck that got him his job and it was luck that got him the opportunities, but he was the one that made the opportunities stick… And that’s exactly what I want to do. I want to use my luck and see if I can make it work, and if I can’t, I can’t, and it’s fine, but I’m going to give it a go.”
It’s so easy to make the “privilege” conversation about everyone else.
“They have white privilege and I’m not white.”
“They have rich privilege and I’m not rich.”
“They have healthy privilege and I’m not healthy.”
Unfortunately, everyone else’s privilege is none of our business. Izzy’s famous father does not take anything from us. It does not harm us. On the contrary, what holds each of us back is, more often than not, our own privilege.
The truth is, every strength invites you to weakness. Every advantage in life is an excuse you no longer have for failure. Every opportunity that lays open before you will tell you precisely how useless you are.
For me to not cheat on my girlfriend is no great achievement. I’m poor, socially awkward, and not particularly attractive. For someone who has the privileges of wealth, charisma, and chiseled features, the temptation to throw away a beautiful relationship is constant.
For me to start a business and go bankrupt is par for the course. I have no business background or private funds to burn through as I learn. Huntington Hartford, on the other hand, has gone down in history for squandering the entire fortune he inherited from his father, the founder of A&P, once the largest grocery store chain in the US.
For me to fail as a cartuber does my pride no harm. I have no access to exciting or beautiful cars, no production value beyond the GoPro I stuck on the dashboard, no established audience to test my presentation on. I consider myself viral when I break into the double digit views. But cars, cameras, and audience were all handed to Izzy Hammond on a silver platter. If she loses that audience, if she costs her channel ad sales, that comes down to her failure as a presenter.
Privilege will crush you if you let it.
In fact, privilege is everything that is crushing today’s younger generations. We are crushed by housing prices, because houses now have electric lights, indoor plumbing, both heating and air conditioning, and more rooms than families living in them.
We are crushed by our monthly bills, which include cell service, internet, and more than one entertainment subscription. We are crushed by our monthly budgets, which must include restaurants and bars and too many options for leisure to even attempt to list.
We are crushed by the cost of our education, which gives us access to the greatest minds in history, and the complex information to build a world of even more plenty.
We are crushed by our healthcare, by remedies available on supermarket shelves that kings would have killed for in the not too distant past.
Life was once so affordable. And it was affordable because we once were crushed, not by having too much, but by having too little. Life was affordable because we were at risk of being raided by Vikings or eaten by lions or withered away by tuberculosis.
I know how lucky I am. I KNOW how lucky I am to have been born into the world I’ve been born into. But if you ever find yourself wasting your time whining about somebody else’s privilege, then it has been far too long since you counted your own blessings.
