More Related News
Sports News
FASHION
ENTERTAINMENT
OPINION | SOCIETY & HUMAN BEHAVIOUR
There is a particular kind of cruelty that is not deliberate, not malicious, and not even fully conscious — and that is precisely what makes it so difficult to address. It is the cruelty of the person who has recently escaped hardship and, within a remarkably short time, begins to speak about hardship as though it were a personal choice made by the people still inside it.
The pattern is so common, and so consistent across different contexts and cultures, that it almost certainly reflects something structural about human psychology rather than something specific to any individual's character. A person who was genuinely struggling — borrowing money, skipping meals, navigating the daily indignities of financial precarity — receives a breakthrough. A salary. A contract. An opportunity that pays well. And within months, sometimes weeks, the memory of what it felt like to be on the other side begins to dissolve. In its place grows something else: a quiet conviction that the current position was earned through superior effort, superior faith, or superior character, and that the people still struggling simply lack whatever quality produced the improvement.
The Banyankore of western Uganda have a proverb that captures this with devastating precision: "Ekyeeba Juba n'obworo n'obugumba" — people forget poverty and barrenness faster than everything else. It is an observation rooted in long experience of human behaviour, and it holds up under scrutiny. Of all the things human beings are capable of forgetting, the specific texture of their own suffering appears to be among the most efficiently erased.
Consider a scenario that will be familiar to many readers. Two people know each other. One has a skill the other lacks. When an opportunity comes in that requires that skill, the person with the connection brings in the person with the skill, expecting a reasonable share of whatever the arrangement produces. The person with the skill takes the opportunity, works for several months, and is paid handsomely — in the way that international organisations sometimes pay, which is to say, generously by local standards.
Within a short time, the newly prosperous person has a car, a building under construction, a changed social profile. When the person who brought them the opportunity asks for the agreed share, they receive a WhatsApp message explaining that the reason they are not doing well financially is that they do not pray hard enough. They are advised to go to church more seriously. God, the message implies, rewards the deserving — and the evidence of that reward is the sender's new car.
What makes this example particularly instructive is not the betrayal of a financial agreement, serious as that is. It is the speed and completeness of the cognitive transformation. In the space of six months, a person who was on the street struggling has not only forgotten what that felt like but has constructed an entire theological framework to explain why they deserved to escape it and why others have not. The struggling friend is not poor because of bad luck, structural disadvantage, or the absence of someone to bring them an opportunity. They are poor because they do not pray hard enough. The implication is clear: the newly prosperous person prays harder, and God has responded accordingly.
In six months, the man who was on the street has not merely forgotten his struggle. He has built a complete explanation for why he deserved to leave it — and why his friend deserves to remain.
This kind of reasoning is not unique to religious framing. The same structure appears in secular versions all the time. The person who was once unable to afford rent and is now earning well will explain that the difference is discipline — they worked harder, planned better, sacrificed more. The person who grew up poor and now has means will sometimes speak about poverty with a contempt that their own recent history should make impossible but apparently does not. The framework changes depending on the person's background and beliefs. The underlying move is always the same: convert a change in circumstances into evidence of personal superiority, and convert the unchanged circumstances of others into evidence of personal deficiency.
The psychological mechanism behind this is well understood, even if it is rarely discussed honestly. Human beings have a powerful drive toward what psychologists call attribution bias — the tendency to explain our own successes as products of internal qualities (intelligence, effort, faith, discipline) while explaining our failures as products of external circumstances (bad luck, unfair systems, other people's behaviour). When circumstances improve, this bias intensifies. The improved position feels deserved because the mind naturally reaches for internal explanations of positive outcomes. The struggling position of others feels self-inflicted because the same bias attributes their outcomes to their internal qualities.
There is also the role of what might be called experiential distance. When you are inside a difficult circumstance, you understand its texture with an intimacy that cannot be fully communicated to someone who has never been there. You know which specific doors are closed, which specific obstacles are immovable, which specific forms of help are unavailable. When you leave that circumstance, the specific knowledge begins to fade. What remains is the general memory that things were difficult, stripped of the details that made the difficulty real. And without those details, the temptation grows to explain the difficulty retrospectively as a motivational rather than a structural problem — something that required only enough determination to overcome.
The person still in the difficult circumstance has not lacked determination. They have lacked the specific door that opened for the person now advising them to pray harder. But the person who walked through the door can no longer remember, with sufficient vividness, how closed every other door was.
The person still struggling has not lacked determination. They have lacked the specific door that opened for someone else. But the person who walked through that door can no longer remember, with sufficient vividness, how closed every other door was.
This is compounded by social pressure. Once a person achieves a certain level of prosperity, they are surrounded by new peers who also tend to attribute their position to merit. The social environment reinforces the belief. To acknowledge that luck, connection, and timing played a significant role in one's improvement is to risk seeming ungrateful, faithless, or insufficiently confident in one's own abilities. It is much more comfortable — and more socially rewarded — to maintain the narrative of deserved success.
None of this is an argument for fatalism or for the proposition that effort and choices are irrelevant to outcomes. They are not irrelevant. But the distance between effort and outcome is mediated by circumstances that are not equally distributed — access to networks, the availability of opportunities, the presence of someone willing to make a call on your behalf, the timing of when an opportunity arrives relative to where you are in your life. The person who received the opportunity and the person who did not may have exerted identical effort. What differed was not their character. What differed was who knew them, and when.
Understanding this is not merely an intellectual exercise. It has direct practical consequences for how people navigate relationships and manage their own mental health. If you expect the person you helped — who is now doing better than you — to remember what you did and respond with proportionate gratitude and fairness, you are likely to be disappointed more often than not. Not because people are uniformly ungrateful, but because the psychological process of forgetting struggle is so reliable and so rapid that even genuinely good people are vulnerable to it.
The Banyankore proverb does not say that bad people forget poverty. It says people forget poverty. The observation is not a moral judgement. It is an anthropological one. And the wisdom embedded in it is not bitterness but preparation — an instruction to understand human behaviour accurately rather than to be repeatedly surprised and hurt by it.
There are exceptions. There are people who have come through difficulty and retained a genuine, active memory of what it felt like — people who use that memory to extend specific, practical help rather than general spiritual advice. These people exist, and they are worth recognising and staying close to. But they are exceptions precisely because what they are doing requires a deliberate effort against a strong psychological current. Remembering struggle with sufficient vividness to act on that memory requires active, ongoing work. Forgetting it is effortless.
Forgetting struggle is effortless. Remembering it with enough vividness to act on it requires deliberate, ongoing effort against a strong psychological current. That is why the exceptions are exceptions.
The practical implication for anyone navigating these realities is straightforward, if uncomfortable. Do not build your emotional security on the expectation that people who have improved their circumstances will remember where they came from and act accordingly. Some will. Many will not — and their failure to do so is less a reflection of their character than a demonstration of a well-documented human tendency. Understanding this in advance does not make the disappointment painless, but it does make it less destabilising.
It also carries a mirror-function. The same pattern that is so visible in others is operating in each of us. The areas of our lives where we are comfortable are the areas where we are most likely to have forgotten what discomfort felt like and least likely to extend genuine understanding to those still in it. The question worth asking periodically — with honesty rather than self-punishment — is not whether we have forgotten some of what we once knew about struggling. We almost certainly have. The question is whether we are at least aware that we have, and whether that awareness is shaping how we speak to and about the people who are where we once were.
Because the person on the street is not there because they pray less. They are there because the door that opened for someone else has not yet opened for them. And if it does, the most honest thing that person can offer — more honest than advice, more honest than theology, more honest than attribution of their improvement to superior virtue — is to remember, for as long as they can, exactly what it felt like to be waiting for it.
