What happens when you inherit the fruits of someone else’s struggle without inheriting the struggle that taught them what those fruits were worth?

There was a time when I wanted perfume or a car I couldn’t afford. Nothing dramatic happened, I survived, nobody needs perfume, but I remember the wanting itself, and the flat, uninteresting fact that wanting it had no bearing whatsoever on whether I could have it.

Now I own too much perfume and a car I don’t even drive. The interesting thing is that the bottles still carry something of the woman who couldn’t buy them. I know what they cost in a way that has very little to do with the number on the receipt, and somewhere inside the pleasure of owning them now is the memory of not being able to. Desire used to have distance built into it. I’ve been thinking about that distance a lot lately, and more specifically about what happens when parents become successful enough to remove it entirely for their children.

This is supposed to be the dream, isn’t it.? We work so they don’t have to struggle the way we did. We earn so they don’t have to worry the way we did. We make the calls, find the schools, pay for the lessons, walk them into rooms we once couldn’t get into ourselves. I suffered so my child wouldn’t have to is one of the most understandable promises a parent can make. But I wonder whether, somewhere in the process of keeping it, we occasionally remove something else along with the suffering. Not the hard part. The friction. And I’m starting to think those two things aren’t the same at all.

The inheritance problem

A successful parent can hand a child the fruits of resilience. What they can’t hand over is the experience that grew it. You can tell your children about the years you had nothing, the job you hated, the rejection letters, the overdraft, the tiny flat, the people who wouldn’t return your calls, and they’ll understand you, properly, intellectually. But memory doesn’t transfer. The child who has only ever known abundance can’t remember scarcity on your behalf, however clearly you describe it to them.

Your twenty pounds once contained a decision. Petrol or dinner. Dinner or drinks. Buy it now or wait until payday. Their twenty pounds might just be twenty pounds. Neither version makes one of you a better person than the other, they’re just different kinds of information about how the world works, and that difference is what I keep circling, because we talk endlessly about what wealth gives children and hardly ever about what it takes away.

Money is extraordinarily good at removing friction. The train’s inconvenient, so there’s a Uber. The school isn’t working, so there’s another school. She wants to learn guitar, so there’s an excellent teacher. He wants to make films, so there’s equipment. She wants to study abroad, so there’s a plane ticket. He wants to meet someone in the industry, and it turns out somebody already knows somebody. That’s what money is for, and I have no objection to any of it on its own terms. But friction was doing something while we were busy eliminating it. It was giving us information.

The apprenticeship nobody can inherit

Say two nineteen-year-olds both decide they want to be photographers. The first buys whatever camera she can afford and takes terrible photographs that nobody cares about. She takes more terrible photographs. She asks someone for work and gets ignored, assists somebody better than her, gets told her lighting is dreadful and actually learns lighting because of it. She shoots a friend’s wedding cheaply and makes a mess of half of it. Slowly, almost invisibly, she becomes a photographer.

Now say the second nineteen-year-old has an enormously powerful surname. He decides he’s a photographer, and doors that took the first girl years to find simply open. There’s an agent. Celebrity subjects become available. A prestigious magazine takes the call. Someone offers him a book deal before he’s shot a single roll. He’s acquired the infrastructure of success before he’s acquired the competence that infrastructure usually exists to recognise.

We normally talk about that as unfairness, and it is, but I think something else is happening to him too. He’s being starved of accurate feedback. The first girl keeps hearing not yet, which is painful and also, underneath the pain, extremely useful. The second boy mostly hears brilliant, let’s do it, right up until the work meets the actual public, and then thousands of strangers deliver all the feedback that everyone close to him was too invested, too dazzled by the surname or just too polite to give. Not yet becomes “you’re a joke” almost overnight, and there’s something close to cruelty in that particular version of the fall.

We mock privileged kids for bouncing between identities, model, photographer, chef, designer, entrepreneur, sometimes deservedly, because adults are responsible for the claims they make about their own competence. But I wonder if some of what we’re actually watching is ordinary identity formation with the volume turned all the way up. Most of us were allowed to be embarrassingly bad at things in private. Imagine having to find out what you’re good at while the world is already watching, and worse, imagine never having had the chance to learn that being bad at something is usually just the first stage of becoming good at it.

The world is your oyster

Then there’s choice, which we tend to assume must be a straightforward good, more options producing more freedom in a neat upward line. Up to a point it does. After that point, things get strange. Psychologists have been arguing about the paradox of choice for years now, the idea that more options don’t keep making us happier forever, that at some stage choosing itself gets harder because every selection now contains all the alternatives you turned down.

I think extreme privilege produces a particularly interesting version of this. Most lives get shaped partly by what’s unavailable. You can afford this university and not that one, so you go there. You live here, so you look for work here. You need an income eventually, so one of your interests has to become more serious than the rest of them. Constraint closes doors, and annoyingly, closed doors are often what help you work out which open one you actually wanted.

Now imagine almost none of them are closed. Music, of course. Photography, we know someone. Fashion, naturally. Film, there’s a producer coming to dinner. Start a company, here’s the capital. Move to New York, there’s an apartment waiting. The world is your oyster, except nobody’s stopped to ask whether you actually know what you want from the fucking oyster. Unlimited possibility can turn into its own kind of paralysis, because if everything is possible, nothing has to become necessary, and getting good at anything usually requires a stretch of time where you choose it at the expense of everything else. You stay when it gets boring. You keep going when nobody’s applauding. You put up with being mediocre for a while. You do the same thing again tomorrow. That’s not glamorous. That’s fucking life.

Now imagine your parents are legends

There’s another kind of inheritance money can’t fix, which is scale. Try working out what achievement even means when extraordinary achievement was the wallpaper of your childhood. Your father didn’t just play football, he became one of the most recognisable footballers alive. Your mother didn’t just model, she became one of the faces of an era. Your parent didn’t just act, or sing, or build a company, or make art, they became culturally significant, and nobody’s ever quite told you what you’re meant to do with that.

Become successful, compared to what. Make money, money’s never been especially mysterious to you. Become famous, you learned as a child that fame was just something waiting outside the restaurant. There’s a particular cruelty hidden in the compliment people hand these kids constantly, you’re so lucky, because the unspoken second half of the sentence writes itself: now do something worthy of all that luck. Your parents started with nothing, look what they built, look at everything you’ve been given, what are you going to do with it. Nobody even has to say it out loud. A child can construct that sentence perfectly well alone, at two in the morning, without any help.

And whatever they do, their name arrives in the room first. Their first piece of work gets compared to someone else’s twentieth. Their mistakes become evidence of nepotism. Their successes become evidence of nepotism too. Even praise can erase them, of course she’s talented, look at her mother, and I imagine that at some point the question underneath all of it gets painfully simple. Can I be me.

The fields that won’t lie to you

This is also why nepotism interests me more in some professions than others. Connections can get someone remarkably far. They can get you an audition, get your manuscript read, get your photographs hung, get your film financed, get your track in front of a producer, get you into the room. But some disciplines contain a mechanism that eventually refuses to budge for anyone. The stopwatch doesn’t care who your father is. Neither does the equation. Neither does the patient on the table. A family can buy a child the finest tennis coach alive, and eventually somebody still has to return the serve.

Even in the arts, where taste is subjective and there’s enough infrastructure available to prop up genuinely mediocre work for a surprisingly long time, there’s still, eventually, an audience looking at the thing itself. Social capital can postpone reality. It can’t abolish it. Which brings me back to friction.

Children don’t need suffering

This is exactly where an argument like this can go badly wrong, so let me be direct about where I actually stand. I don’t think deprivation is virtuous. Poverty doesn’t build character on any kind of schedule, trauma isn’t an educational programme, and I’m always slightly suspicious of people who look back at the suffering they survived and hand it a tidy pedagogical purpose. It made me who I am, maybe, or maybe it hurt you in ways you’ve spent twenty years quietly undoing. I don’t want children going hungry so they understand the value of dinner. I don’t want them frightened of eviction so they learn financial responsibility. A child doesn’t need misery to become an interesting adult.

What I think they need is : Consequence without catastrophe. Waiting for something, saving up for something, losing occasionally and discovering that somebody else is simply better than you today, getting the mark they actually earned rather than the one that was arranged for them, sitting on the bench, being bored, wanting something their parents could easily buy and hearing that the answer is still no. Starting something badly without immediately being told they’re exceptional at it. Being terrible at the guitar and choosing to keep playing anyway. Carrying a responsibility whose failure would land on somebody other than themselves. Solving a problem before a parent quietly solves it for them. Being disappointed while surrounded by enough love and enough security that the disappointment stays exactly what it is, disappointment, and never tips over into disaster.

Because I think that’s what useful friction actually teaches, in order. First, I can survive this. Then, I can try again. Eventually, I can do this. And finally, on the other side of all of it, I did this.

The paradox of inheritance

I think this might be one of the stranger problems successful parents eventually run into. We spend years building a ladder, and then our children are born standing at the top of it. We look down at everything we climbed and think how lucky they are that they’ll never have to make that particular journey. They are lucky. But now they’ve got a different problem, which is that they still have to work out which mountain actually belongs to them, and we can’t do that part for them either.

We can’t manufacture hunger on their behalf. We can’t hand over our memories intact. We can’t make our own childhood deprivation mean anything emotionally to somebody who never lived through it, and I’m no longer sure we should even try. Recreating the exact conditions that made us was never really the job. Our children aren’t sequels to our own lives. Maybe the actual job is resisting the temptation to spend everything we’ve built removing every obstacle from their path, leaving a few doors unopened on purpose, a few introductions unmade, a few problems unsolved, a few wants left temporarily unsatisfied, not because we want them to struggle, but because we want them to actually meet themselves somewhere along the way.

I can buy my daughter something I once wanted desperately and couldn’t have. That’s genuinely one of the pleasures of having more now than I used to. But I’ve started to think there’s another gift hiding in the moment just before I reach for my wallet, which is simply the chance for her to want something, choose it, work for it, fail at it, change her mind about it, and find out on her own what actually matters enough to keep going once the novelty’s worn off.

Maybe the greatest privilege we can hand a child isn’t a frictionless life at all. Maybe it’s enough security to fail without being destroyed by the failure, and just enough resistance along the way that she finds out, on her own, that she can get back up without us there to lift her. Inheritance can give you resources. It can give you access, choices, even the world itself if you’re fortunate enough. What it can’t give you is the one thing every person eventually has to build for themselves, out of whatever they’ve actually lived through.

A life that feels like their own.

I wonder what your version of this looks like, if you’ve got one.