It was an often-repeated phrase in my house growing up. Typically spouted from a place of frustration. Dad would come home tired from a hard day’s work cleaning windows to a house full of kids with complaints – maybe the cheap cheese he’d bought had already gone mouldy, and we’d not been able to make a sandwich for lunch. Or we’d been squabbling all day about only having one controller to play computer games and we were fed up sharing. Other times, though, the complaints had deeper roots – being cold, lonely, upset about school, or simply restless with too little to do.

But when Dad reminded us how lucky we were, the lights of gratitude did not ping on. His words seemed more about quashing the complaint than fostering any understanding of how we felt or how to navigate our messed-up world.

The Bit I Missed

Forty years later, I find myself hearing those words differently.

I’m living in Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in the world. Not the most unequal – South Africa probably takes that title – but poor enough that inequality is impossible to miss. I live in a compound on a hill, in a house larger than any I’ve lived in before, surrounded by high walls with barbed wire atop. However, being on a hill I have clear sight of houses with tin roofs and in less than a minute I can be amidst extreme poverty.

The contrast is immediate. In the UK I was ordinary, I had enough. Here, through no special virtue of my own, I’ve been dropped into the world of the elite. A world where resources are abundant, where gates, walls and generators soften many of life’s difficulties. None of it feels especially remarkable once you get used to it.

But that’s what I hear in Dad’s words now, clumsy though they were: most of what shapes our lives is not chosen. I don’t know whether Dad consciously meant that, but that’s what I hear in those words now. We are born somewhere, into someone’s family, with certain opportunities and limitations already waiting for us.

As children, we had no real way of grasping that. If anything, the culture we were born into trained us in the opposite direction. Advertising, comparisons in the playground, television, and later on social media – showing us what we lacked, not all the gifts we have in our lives that we can easily slip into taking for granted.

What luck changes – and what it doesn’t

Appreciating my luck does not mean my own needs disappear. That is something the childhood version of me was right about. Being cold, lonely, frightened, or ashamed does not stop being painful because someone else has less. Gratitude is not a cure for unmet needs.

But recognising luck does alter things – both the feelings and the potential to respond.

First, it becomes harder to believe that my comfort is entirely earned, or that someone else’s hardship is simply a reflection of poor choices.

The proximity of poverty here makes that impossible to ignore. A man with one leg hobbles through the car park, perhaps injured during the civil war. Children peer into cars at traffic lights trying to sell water or snacks late into the night. A dead dog lies in the street for days. These are not abstract “development issues” over there. They are everyday parts of this landscape.

And an awkward truth is that I can choose not to see them.

I can move through the city in air-conditioned cars with tinted windows, going from one insulated place to another. And sometimes I do this. Sometimes I escape to one of Freetown’s expensive restaurants or a beach far enough outside the city. The relief is real.

And so is the cost. The more I insulate myself from the realities around me, the more isolated I become. I lose the possibility of being part of the wider community – helping and being helped in ways that have nothing to do with money. To avoid the discomfort of seeing others struggle is, in some small way, to disconnect from them and from my own feelings too.

The temptation to explain inequality away

Living here has made it harder to believe the stories we often hear about success and failure.

When I look at my own life, I can see plenty of things I worked for. I studied, built a career, took opportunities when they appeared. But I can also see how much of the foundation was laid before I had any say in the matter.

I was born in Britain rather than Sierra Leone. I grew up in a family that, despite its struggles, cared about me. I met people who encouraged me, opened doors for me, and gave me chances. I was born with certain abilities that made some paths easier to walk than others. None of those things were achievements. They were gifts of circumstance.

The longer I live here, the harder it becomes to ignore how differently lives can unfold simply because people start in different places. I know people who work far harder than I ever have, yet remain trapped by circumstances they did not create and cannot escape.

That doesn’t mean effort is meaningless. It matters enormously. But effort does not begin on a level playing field. Some people are running with a strong wind behind them. Others spend their lives pushing against it.

I suspect that’s why luck is such an uncomfortable idea. It challenges the comforting belief that we entirely deserve what we have earned. It reminds us that our successes are never wholly our own and that other people’s struggles are not always the result of bad choices.

Dad wasn’t trying to teach us political philosophy. He was tired, underappreciated, and trying to put our complaints in perspective. But the older I get, the more I think the important part of his sentence was not that we should be grateful. It was that we didn’t make the foundations of our lives ourselves.

What do you do with that?

I still don’t know what the right response is to what I see each day.

Some days I give money to people who ask. But most days I don’t. Sometimes I walk past someone in obvious distress and feel a thick, useless guilt settle over the rest of the day. Once or twice, I’ve turned around and gone back looking for the person because I couldn’t stop thinking about them. The help is small, inconsistent, inadequate.

But “I can’t help everyone” has gradually stopped feeling like a good reason to help no one.

Another uncomfortable adjustment has been employing people to do chores for me — a cleaner, cook, gardener, and driver. In Britain I would have felt uneasy asking others to do work I could do myself. Here, in a country where formal employment is scarce, those jobs matter. We pay above the going rate and use contracts when many employers do not. It still sits weirdly with me – having things done for me that I know I could do. The power difference is clear. A mix of embarrassment and guilt. I benefit from a system I’m criticising. But it seems like the right thing to do – refusing to participate would not dissolve the inequality; it would mostly remove income from people who need it much more than I do.

That tension runs through daily life here. I want to remain open to other people’s reality without becoming paralysed by guilt. I want to avoid both self-righteousness and numbness. I want to remember that witnessing matters, because one of the cruellest effects of inequality is making people feel unseen.

What I think Dad was really saying

As a child, I heard Dad’s phrase as a dismissal.

Now I hear it as a warning.

Not a warning against complaining, but against forgetting that our lives could easily have been otherwise. Every day I look out from my house on the hill and see lives unfolding differently from mine. The older I get, the more I think Dad was pointing us towards something he couldn’t quite name. Not the importance of gratitude, but luck.