It was a thoroughly unremarkable minute in a grocery store vitamin aisle, about a decade ago. Yet so much of what makes me who I am—my worldview, my morals, my politics—grew out of that moment.
My mother was off buying something else—we had all been assigned items to fetch in order to speed up the shopping. I was supposed to find those Flintstones multivitamins that tasted like candy. While looking for them, I spotted another section of vitamins: “prenatal.”
I’m not sure that I knew what “prenatal” meant back then, but surely the label designs afforded me some context clues. I noticed a broad selection. Some were cheaper; some claimed to afford very specific health benefits. Before that day, I hadn’t known that prenatal vitamins existed.
But I did know my mother. She’d have researched far and wide, asking friends and doctors and doctor friends which ones she should take. She’d have spent any amount of money, any at all, to buy the ones they told her were best. And so the environment in which my most important development took place was likely healthier than that of a baby born in the next room. Already, I realized, before I even opened my eyes for the first time, the advantages of my life had begun.
But, of course, I was already wrong, as we so often are when we try to pinpoint true beginnings. I don’t necessarily know if the quality of prenatal vitamins differs meaningfully by brand, or even if there’s much benefit to taking them at all. But my mother grew up with someone providing her with balanced meals—with a grocery store nearby that sold healthy and varied foods, a car to access them, sufficient money to buy them, a stay-at-home mother to cook them and enough education to know what they were. She grew up always having time and resources for recreational exercise and regular visits to the doctor. Her body was the picture of good health, and the foods she fed it with while I was there were the nutritious ones she had always known.
And that womb must have been surrounded by beautiful sounds. The music that filled my childhood, played on record players and in never-ending piano lessons that would assist my brain development, was surely playing even then. And then there was my mother’s voice, those lilting, patrician words that had been crafted by a master’s degree in English Literature. When my own words eventually began, mimicking them, people assumed I was smarter, higher class—I gained access to all varieties of dinner tables.
Standing in that vitamin aisle, I stopped trying to trace the advantages that circumstances had afforded me, sensing that after my birth they would be too numerous to attempt to track. They were present in everything from the books that had surrounded me from my first day on Earth to the way my parents praised good, hard work, incentivizing delayed reward.
I had always had a sense that I was incredibly lucky. But there, standing in a grocery store aisle, it hit me—luck was written into my very development, was essential to my existence. I had never known a world without it, and I could not be separated from it even if I wanted to be.
Despite the common understanding, the opportunity I was given to excel in life was not, and never could be, equal to anyone else’s.
This is not a bad thing. When I have kids, I want to be able to afford them every advantage I possibly can—even though others will not benefit from the same luck. Aristocracies emerge from the pure, noble desire for our progeny to be more prosperous and successful than we are.
And, even given an aristocracy, the meritocracy is still very much intact. In a number of fields, my carefully guided development led me to genuinely possess capabilities greater than many of my peers. The qualities that my parents cultivated in me—things like critical thinking skills and appreciation for hard work—are incentivized on the global marketplace, and they should be for a well-functioning society.
But the myth of equal opportunity does have negative ramifications.
In his excellent 2012 commencement address, Michael Lewis describes an experiment done by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. The researchers broke student volunteers into groups of three, segregated by sex, and gave them some complex moral problem to discuss. Before doing so, though, they randomly appointed one of the three to be the group’s leader.
Then, half an hour into their discussion, the researchers brought in a plate with four cookies. All the group members got one cookie, but they were then left with one extra. And who ate it? With astonishing regularity, the randomly-appointed leader was the one to claim it.
The leader had no extra responsibilities and had performed no special task. His or her status was entirely random. Yet this arbitrarily-appointed leader was left with the sense that he or she deserved some special reward.
I got my first paycheck this summer. For the first time, I was personally acquainted with the sting of taxes. I sat there staring at the diminished amount, internally ranting about how there was a reason I was paid so much—it was because I had special skills, and I had worked so hard that summer and before that, in school, to hone them, and how could they take my money—
But then I stopped. I remembered ten-year-old me standing in a grocery store vitamin aisle, realizing for the first time that so much of what I am stems from a lucky womb.
Ellie Schaack is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Tuesday.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.