Poverty Is Only an Aesthetic When You Can Afford to Escape It

t’s easy to romanticise struggle when you’re not the one having to survive it.

It’s easy to turn hardship into an aesthetic, a joke or an inspirational story when you have the privilege of stepping away from it.

But for someone else, that struggle isn’t a costume they get to take off at the end of the night.

It’s their everyday reality.

And I think that deserves a little more thought.

Privilege isn’t always about what you have. Sometimes it’s about what you’ve never had to think about.

When we talk about privilege, there’s often an immediate defensiveness that comes up.

People hear the word and assume it means they’ve never worked hard, never experienced pain or somehow had everything handed to them.

But that’s not what privilege means.

Privilege and hardship can coexist.

You can have experienced extraordinary adversity and still hold advantages in other areas of your life. You can have worked incredibly hard for everything you’ve built and still benefit from circumstances that others haven’t had access to.

And I think Martha Stewart’s story is actually a good example of this complexity.

To be fair, Martha herself is no stranger to hardship. She didn’t grow up with the wealth she’s known for today. She’s experienced financial difficulties, family challenges, divorce, imprisonment and the very public rebuilding of her life and career.

Her success hasn’t meant an absence of suffering.

But here’s the thing.

Experiencing hardship doesn’t automatically mean we understand every form of hardship.

We can know what it feels like to struggle and still have blind spots about someone else’s suffering.

Our own experiences can deepen our empathy, but they don’t guarantee it.

And perhaps that’s where the real lesson begins.

Having survived something doesn’t make us experts in what everyone else is surviving.

There’s a difference between appreciating resilience and romanticising suffering.

We live in a world that loves a comeback story.

The person who grew up with nothing and became successful.

The woman who survived heartbreak and found herself.

The entrepreneur who lost everything before building an empire.

The person who turned their pain into purpose.

And don’t get me wrong. There’s something incredibly powerful about witnessing human resilience.

But sometimes, in our admiration for the person who overcame hardship, we forget to question why they had to endure so much in the first place.

We celebrate the strength without acknowledging the suffering.

We praise people for surviving circumstances they should never have had to experience.

We turn survival into something aspirational, forgetting that for many people, it wasn’t a choice.

And this is something I think we need to be more mindful of, particularly in the personal development and spiritual spaces.

Not everything happens because the universe is trying to teach you a lesson.

Not every painful experience needs to be reframed as a blessing.

Not every struggle is secretly preparing you for something greater.

Sometimes life is unfair.

Sometimes people experience suffering they didn’t deserve.

Sometimes the circumstances themselves need to change, rather than asking people to become stronger so they can continue enduring them.

We can honour someone’s resilience without glorifying what made that resilience necessary.

Suffering looks different when you have the privilege of opting out.

Think about how differently we experience the same circumstances depending on the choices available to us.

Minimalism can feel freeing when you have the financial security to own more.

Starting over can feel adventurous when you have a safe home to return to.

Taking a break from work can feel restorative when your basic needs are already covered.

Living with less can feel spiritually liberating when it’s a choice rather than a necessity.

And that’s the distinction.

What feels empowering to one person may feel devastating to another.

Not because one person is more grateful, resilient or spiritually evolved.

But because their circumstances are different.

Their access to resources is different.

Their level of safety is different.

Their choices are different.

And when we forget this, we can unintentionally minimise the realities of people whose lives look nothing like our own.

It’s easy to tell someone to simply leave a toxic relationship when you’ve never had to worry about where you’d sleep if you did.

It’s easy to tell someone money doesn’t buy happiness when you’ve never had to choose between paying rent and buying groceries.

It’s easy to tell someone to stop living in survival mode when you’ve never experienced what it means to have your basic needs consistently threatened.

This doesn’t mean our advice always comes from a bad place.

Often, we genuinely want to help.

But good intentions don’t automatically make our perspective complete.

And sometimes, what we believe is encouragement can feel like dismissal to someone whose reality we haven’t taken the time to understand.

Good intentions don’t erase impact.

One of the more interesting parts of Martha’s controversy is that she issued a second apology.

And I think this opens up another conversation about accountability.

Because how often do we hurt someone, only to spend more time explaining why we didn’t mean to than actually listening to why it hurt?

We say things like:

“I was only joking.”

“That wasn’t my intention.”

“You’re taking it the wrong way.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

And while those explanations might be true, they don’t necessarily address the impact.

Two things can exist at once.

You can genuinely mean well and still cause harm.

You can be a good person and make an insensitive decision.

You can care deeply about other people and still have perspectives that need challenging.

Being accountable doesn’t require us to believe we’re terrible people.

It requires us to be willing to consider that our intentions and someone else’s experience of our actions may not be the same.

And that can be uncomfortable.

Particularly when we’re deeply attached to seeing ourselves as kind, compassionate, understanding or self-aware.

But real growth asks us to loosen our grip on the identity of being someone who always gets it right.

Sometimes we’re not being misunderstood. Sometimes we’re being asked to understand something we haven’t considered before.

And that’s a very different invitation.

Accountability doesn’t have to mean humiliation.

I also think there’s something worth exploring in how we respond when someone gets things wrong publicly.

Because while criticism can be warranted, I wonder whether we’ve become so focused on identifying people’s mistakes that we sometimes forget what accountability is supposed to achieve.

Is the goal to help someone understand the harm they’ve caused?

Is it to encourage different behaviour moving forward?

Is it to create greater awareness?

Or is it simply to make sure they feel as bad as possible for getting it wrong?

I don’t think compassion and accountability are mutually exclusive.

We can acknowledge that someone’s actions were insensitive without reducing their entire identity to one decision.

We can recognise harm without pretending that public humiliation automatically creates meaningful change.

And we can make room for someone to learn without insisting that an apology erases the original impact.

The important distinction is that forgiveness, understanding and accountability aren’t the same thing.

Someone can apologise and still have work to do.

Someone can learn and still face consequences.

And someone can deserve compassion without being entitled to forgiveness.

There’s nuance here.

And I think we lose something important when we approach every conversation as though there must be one entirely good person and one entirely bad person.

Empathy begins where our own experience ends.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from this entire conversation is that empathy isn’t simply imagining how we would feel if we were in someone else’s position.

Because the truth is, we’re not them.

We don’t have their history.

We don’t carry their experiences.

We don’t have the same resources, support systems, opportunities or circumstances.

And even if we’ve experienced something similar, it doesn’t mean we’ve experienced it in the same way.

Sometimes empathy is recognising that we don’t fully understand.

That our personal experiences aren’t universal.

That what seems like an obvious choice to us may not be an available choice to someone else.

That someone’s circumstances might be far more complex than what we can see from the outside.

And that we don’t need to personally relate to someone’s suffering for it to deserve our compassion.

I think this is where self-awareness becomes so much bigger than simply knowing our own patterns, triggers and emotional responses.

It’s also about understanding the lens through which we see the world.

The beliefs we’ve inherited.

The assumptions we’ve never questioned.

The privileges we’ve normalised.

The ways our own experiences have shaped what we believe everyone else should be capable of.

And perhaps most importantly, our willingness to recognise that our perspective will always be incomplete.

The work isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being willing to see differently.

I don’t think the lesson from Martha Stewart’s Halloween controversy is that we should all be terrified of making mistakes.

Nor do I think it’s productive to pretend that we’re somehow above the same blind spots we’re so quick to identify in others.

Because the reality is that every single one of us has perspectives shaped by what we’ve lived through and what we haven’t.

Every single one of us has assumptions we haven’t yet examined.

And every single one of us has the capacity to unintentionally misunderstand, dismiss or minimise someone else’s experience.

The difference is what we choose to do when those blind spots are brought to our attention.

Do we become defensive?

Do we rush to explain ourselves?

Do we dismiss the feedback because it challenges how we see ourselves?

Or can we become curious?

Can we listen without immediately needing to respond?

Can we acknowledge that someone else’s experience might reveal something our own hasn’t taught us?

Can we be willing to change our minds?

Because I think that’s what meaningful personal growth looks like.

Not becoming someone who never gets anything wrong.

But becoming someone who is willing to learn when they do.

Someone who can hold both confidence and humility.

Someone who can acknowledge their own suffering without using it to invalidate someone else’s.

Someone who understands that compassion isn’t reserved for experiences we personally relate to.

You don’t have to experience someone’s suffering to take it seriously.

You don’t have to understand every detail of their struggle to believe it matters.

And you don’t have to have lived the same life to approach someone else’s with dignity.

Perhaps awareness begins when we stop asking people to make their pain relatable to us before we decide it’s worthy of compassion.

And perhaps the most important question isn’t whether Martha Stewart got it wrong.

It’s whether we’re willing to recognise the moments in our own lives when we might be getting something wrong, too.

Because it’s one thing to recognise someone else’s blind spots.

It’s another thing entirely to confront our own.

A little invitation to reflect

Where in your own life might something you’ve never had to worry about be shaping the way you judge someone who does?

What assumptions have you made about someone’s circumstances because your own experience was different?

And when was the last time you allowed someone else’s perspective to genuinely change yours?

These are the kinds of conversations I love exploring through my work as a life coach. Not because personal growth is about constantly finding something wrong with ourselves, but because there’s so much freedom in questioning the beliefs, patterns and perspectives we’ve unconsciously carried through life.

My approach to coaching is grounded in self-awareness, compassion, authenticity and the understanding that we are always capable of learning, unlearning and becoming.

If you’re in a season of questioning what you’ve always believed, navigating change or wanting to understand yourself and the way you relate to others more deeply, I’d love to support you through one-on-one life coaching.

Because sometimes the greatest growth doesn’t come from finding more answers. It comes from being willing to ask different questions.