Sarah Moss: I find the phrase ‘first world problems’ deeply objectionable

When I wrote last week about my guilt about flying too much, I fretted that I was airing a luxury problem. Not using social media means I don’t know if everyone hates me, but sometimes the voices I imagine might be as bad as whatever is actually said. A friend sometimes declines to discuss what he calls “D4 problems”, even though neither of us has ever lived in D4 and I invariably point out that an Eircode is no protection from trouble. I know what he means. Anxieties specific to the bourgeoisie. They’re sometimes called “first world problems”.

I find the phrase “first world problems” deeply objectionable. It suggests that humans live on different planets, determined by economic conditions, which lets us off many hooks we would have to discuss if we accepted that all global resources are inequitably shared.

Some people live without access to healthcare and clean water not because they live in another world but because the goods of our one world are unfairly distributed. “First world” suggests that these different worlds have a hierarchy, or a winner, like a sports competition, erasing the knowledge that no one is free until everyone is free. It’s often used to suggest that psychological and emotional suffering is some kind of luxury unavailable to people whose basic physical needs are unmet, as if poorer people have simpler minds and feelings than richer people. It would in some ways be nice if that were so, if poverty, hunger and homelessness brought relief from anxiety, desire and self-sabotage, but it’s not true. Food scarcity does not displace irritation with your mother or dislike of your hair, though it probably means you have fewer resources to address these troubles. Poverty is not purifying.

It’s tempting to think that self-castigation offsets privilege, in the way that it feels as if shame should offset flying. If I forbid myself to complain about not being able to find in Ireland some small treat I used to enjoy elsewhere – freshly made Indian sweets, say, or a particular knitting yarn – I do not become someone whose mind is devoted to suffering. I’m not sure it would help anyone if I did. I understand that there is a spectrum of trouble and that the availability of high-end knitting supplies is at one end of it, but there are humans all the way along, often the same humans showing up in different places at the same time. We contain multitudes: I can want Indian sweets and worry about a family member’s cancer diagnosis at the same time.

I spent hours once wandering a city centre looking for pyjamas that met the exacting criteria of someone about to transfer out of intensive care and therefore out of hospital gowns; nothing about nearly dying had changed my beloved person’s views about nightwear, nor indeed about the narrow margin of ripeness acceptable in a banana.

Sometimes the small needs grow in the face of big needs, because little things can bring consolation in the face of big things we can’t change. You could call the little things trivial and insist that we should spend all of our time and energy staring the big things in the face, but I’d say that makes you part of the problem, because the point isn’t that we all join each other in deepest misery but that we share joy as evenly as possible. You don’t achieve that by restriction and denial.

And still, of course, I am extraordinarily lucky to have the kind of work that brings invitations to international travel, and it is appropriate and reasonable for me to take note of the wider consequences of my international travel. But unless I’m going to change my behaviour (no, or not yet), my guilt does nothing to mitigate climate change and detracts uselessly from the enjoyment of my work. It’s hard to let go of the instinct for scolding ourselves and others, but scolding is not a way to make the world a better place. There is not a global shortage of blame.