Life Snippets: People's Journeys Archives

The $2,000 Exile (A Life Snippet)

Photo Credit: abdullah ali (a stock photo, not the person in question for the sake of privacy)

Today’s Life Snippet is about a US military veteran from Indiana who ended up homeless and is now traveling the world.

He is 23-years old. He was in the Air Force to work in cybersecurity and cyberwarfare but injured his feet. He struggled to pass the physical clearance to be considered “combat ready.” After the fifth attempt, he tried to force himself to run a 14-minute despite his feet already being swollen from his previous attempts. Trying to do this run caused several hundred tiny fractures in his feet, and they are still injured to this day. Walking and standing is incredibly painful for him.

The military wanted to discharge him, but he forced them to keep him for two more years. They assigned him various desk jobs because of his injury. Sometimes they intentionally gave him menial tasks to degrade him and convince him to want to leave, such as telling him to digitize a room full of paper documents. He said he spent six weeks pulling staplers out of the stacks of papers, something he found mind-numbingly boring. Eventually after two years, the military forced him out.

Because of his injury, the military will give him $2,000 a month for the rest of his life. That is not enough to live on in the US. He tried to settle in Florida and tried to find a job there but ended up cycling between awful jobs that did not work for him. Some jobs, such as a waitressing job and construction job, required too much standing for his disability. He then worked in IT, but he felt like they belittled him by acting as if he didn’t understand computers when he had two years of experience doing advanced computing with the military. They bought him a car that he was supposed to pay back in installments through deductions in his paycheck, but when he quit, he simply kept the car anyways.

Overall, he said the military was the best place he worked. He loved someone telling him what to do, finding comfort in the structure that produced. He never found this comfort or satisfaction again in any of his future employers. None of them offered the stability and sense of meaning and purpose that the military provided him.

His mom offered to have him stay with her back home in Indiana while he found a new job and got on his feet. He went back home, but soon afterwards, she kicked him out of her house, because she was getting married to a new husband. Their stated reason was that the new husband had teenage daughters, and the daughters were not safe with him around. He had no interest in these girls (who were prepubescent, the oldest being 13), finding the insulation that he would want to be involved with a bunch of minors gross and offensive.

Nonetheless, she kicked him out of the house, and he ended up homeless in Indiana. He said you needed a car to go anywhere or do anything. He spent his remaining money to buy a ticket to Thailand at the end of 2025, arriving here with no money. $2,000 a month is not enough to live in the US, but it is here in Thailand and in Southeast Asia in general it is fine, so he wants to carve out his life here.

He is enrolling in a self-paced online university to study cybersecurity. They told him they don’t accept students not in the US, but through VPNs, he pretends he is in the US. They said they didn’t want to deal with the time zone shift of someone from another part of the world, but he sees that as his problem. He can meet for classes and stuff during their time zone and deal with that himself. That’s his decision.

More broadly, he said he doesn’t connect emotionally with people, like normal people seem to. When he talks to people, he doesn’t really feel like people seem to when they connect. Many people also only have superficial conversations anyways. He doesn’t really have an effective alternative way to deal with emotions. Instead dark thoughts often roll around inside of him, particularly anxiety and depression. He has found therapy really helpful, though.

How a Tongan Pageant Queen Reclaimed Her True Self (A Life Snippet)

(This week’s Life Snippet is about a Tongan woman who used to travel around in beauty pageants across the Pacific before having a mental health breakdown from the stress. Now, she is rebuilding her life back home with the support of her family. She explains what the world of beauty pageantry was like for her, why it led to a breakdown, and how she got out of it.)

Mele (not her real name) stopped doing beauty pageants seven months ago. She started when she was 17 and ended by the time was 21.

Being from Tonga in Polynesia, she competed in different competitions throughout the Pacific, but many would treat her differently as a Polynesian woman. For example, in a competition in Manila, Philippines, the pageantry set aside her and all other Polynesian women, treating them as second class competitors from the get-go. Filipino beauty standards tend to favor lighter-skinned women. She got so frustrated she quit the pageant early. Similarly, people in Hong Kong could be rude to her because of how she looked.

She said that she used to cry every single day and experience frequent panic attacks when she did the pageants. This culminated in a mental health breakdown, which was when she realized it wasn’t worth it anymore and she needed to get out. She quit pageantry altogether.

She decided to head back home for seven months and is staying with her family while she rebuilds her life. She is doing a lot better now. She gained back some weight, and she has been dealing with the emotional and spiritual burnout from her ordeal. She no longer has panic attacks or crying episodes nor does she feel randomly agitated by little things like she did when she performed in beauty pageants. Her family has been supportive of her during this time and given her the space to figure out who she is. At the moment, she prefers staying home and being with them relationally to working or doing any other activity.

At the same time, family pressure may be slowly creeping in. She is the eldest daughter of seven kids with many obligations to take care of her younger siblings. In particular, her youngest sister is three years-old, and she acts as a second mother to her. This can be a lot of pressure, but being the eldest taught her how to take care of things and to lead.

She also seems to be experiencing pressure to marry. She said, in Tonga, despite the fact that people cannot legally marry until they are at least 18, many (especially girls) still marry between 15 and 20. There are some changes to this, but as someone in her early twenties, she seems to face pressure to get married and through that transition to a new life. This may disrupt her current respite, and she seems hesitant to do so until she’s ready. How to juggle between her own healing while rebuilding her life and facing family pressure to marry seem to be the biggest question she faces in her life right now.

Freedom Found by Leaving One’s Home and Traveling the World (A Life Snippet)

(This Life Snippet is about a young adult from Barcelona, Spain, also traveling the world. For her, this journey is about leaving the “prisons” of her hometown and finding herself in the process. You can see more of my Life Snippets of different people in different parts of the world here.)

Julia is a 29-year old Spanish woman from Barcelona who is traveling the world. She has spent most of her time so far (about a year) in New Zealand on the work-travel visa program doing various odd jobs (ranging from picking fruit to hospitality jobs). I met her on a short trip to Tonga in Oceania, where she went on a couple day vacation to swim with whales.

She likes aspects of Barcelona’s culture but also felt the need to get out. One reason is the city’s recent rise in cost of living (largely due to the increasing influx of tourists). More importantly, however, she felt constrained by the community there. She wanted space from her abusive, alcoholic mother, in particular.

She likes the fact that Spanish culture is communal, but as a young adult woman, she found those relationships constraining. In her experience, people there tended to have a prescribed model for how people (especially women) should live their lives: find a job, get married, and then build a family of kids. For example, when she tells people back home that she is currently traveling the world, their most common response is, “What is wrong with you that you are not building your life?”, as if the fact that she is not settling down with a job and family is the only way to build one’s life.

One of her most valuable lessons traveling is seeing how many different ways people live their lives in various cultures around the world. She sees a freedom in this that she can’t experience in her hometown. In her experience, in New Zealand, people leave each other alone, and she also finds a freedom in this. For example, she can walk down the street without having to talk to people or implicitly explain herself like she would back home.

She really enjoys New Zealand but sees it as a place to live for a year, not long-term. She plans to head back to Spain in about three months. She will travel to Southeast Asia and/or Micronesia first, though, before heading back. She plans to get her dive master training so that as she travels throughout Southeast Asia she can pay her way working at different dive centers along various beach towns as she goes. She may work at t one for a few months before moving on. To me, this seemed like her ideal lifestyle (at this moment in her life), and even though she said she planned to head back to Spain in three months, I suspected she would end up preferring doing this for several months longer instead before heading back. She seems to gush at the possibilities, clearly excited about it.

I have talked with many Westerners who want to travel the world by working at different dive centers like this. For them, it seems like an ideal way to make enough to get by for those who want to travel and really enjoy beaches and the beauty of the ocean.

As a college student, her first international trips were to other parts of Europe (such as London and Prague). That is when she first experienced how visiting a new country can free you to be someone else: she is not tied down by others in her community and their associations with her. She can explore new parts of herself.

She studied biology with a focus on animals and in graduate school, took a more extensive trip researching how tourists feeding monkeys influenced their behavior in Bolivia. In the specific part of the Amazon she stayed, tourists frequently fed a specific species of monkeys causing them to expect food from humans and become violent when a human they encountered did not feed them.

This reflects a wider concern she has about animal-based tourism. She talked about how many tour companies do not respect the animals, instead preferring to mistreat the animals so that they can guarantee tourists will be able to witness them. For example, she saw tour companies in Indonesia feed whale sharks to encourage them to show up and then bring large groups of tourists who then swarm and frighten sharks. This influences their behavior, causing problems and potentially harming them and the ecosystem in the long-run.

In certain situations, she has mixed feelings about this, however. For example, in Kalimantan (also called Borneo), Indonesia, she went on orangutan tours. Some tour companies seemed to feed the orangutans to encourage them to come, but at the same time, the tours were a key source of income for a relatively impoverished community. If they were not able to do these tours, the people would most likely have to cut down the forest to plant farms (the next option as a viable source of income). That loss of habitat would wipe out the orangutan population anyways. Thus, in this instance, she felt like the tours were a reasonable middle ground for both the local human and orangutan communities, allowing them to best meet their needs. This reflects a tension and complexity I have also felt about animal tours while traveling the world (maybe one day I will write about this topic in more detail, after I have had time to do some more research on it).

She really loves New Zealand, but she does not like how the country seems built on the labor of immigrants, particularly those who come on a work-holiday visa like her. She gets to see New Zealand, but she is also stuck working low-pay, temporary jobs while those in New Zealand who own and manage those businesses receive all the benefits. New Zealanders don’t like to work, instead preferring to rely on immigrant workers such as the pool of young adults on work-holiday visas. Many on this visa are paid close-to break even, especially since rent in New Zealand is high. Thus, they cannot save. She could only save when she bought a camper van, deciding to live camping outside even for several months when it was cold. This allowed her to avoid the high rents, though.

Overall, she seems to enjoy her life. She is not only discovering the beauty of New Zealand but also seems to be finding herself. This experience is giving her a break from her family (especially her mercurial mother) and her confining community back in Barcelona. She seemed content just being and seeing where life takes her.

Life Snippets: Glimpses into People’s Lives

As I travel the world, I have listened to a lot of people’s stories. These “Life Snippets” are glimpses into people’s lives around the world: what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context and how they choose to navigate the challenges in life. Hearing people’s stories helps me understand the rich tapestry that is humanity, and I hope it does the same for you.

Here are the Life Snippets reverse with the most recent first:

Fail, Pivot, Feed: Lessons Learned Hustling in Baguio, Philippines

This is about a local entrepreneur I met in Baguio, Philippines. It’s part of Life Snippets Series, where as I travel the world, I compile glimpses into people’s lives around the world, what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context, and how they navigate the challenges of life. You can find more of these snippets here. If you want to read another story about a woman trying to start a restaurant business in a different part of Southeast Asia with very different prospects, see this.

She is one of eight children: four boys and four girls. She studied psychology in undergrad. One of her brothers, who was a professor I believe also in psychology, committed suicide at the age of 22. She said that she felt like the family did not ask him how he was doing enough or show him positive affection. She finished her degree but decided not to work in psychology because she associated that with her brother. She also said she has had to forgive herself and others and to heal from this, which has been a process.

She loves cooking and serving others food. She much prefers that, finding it very life giving. She currently runs a small, counter-serve restaurant. This is her fourth or fifth business. The others failed, and she finally learned how to be successful in it.

Her first business was a restaurant that she co-started with a friend. She and her friend had several disputes. In particular, her friend bought stuff without her permission, which caused the business to blow through its budget. She said the core problem was that they weren’t on the same page on who would run the business. Her friend wanted to have someone fund her to do her own business, and she wanted to be equals in the process of the business. She also said she had to learn the hard way value of first approaching the person positively instead of accusatorily.

Her friend offered to split the business 50-50 with each person controlling their portion to do their thing or cash out and cut her losses. She chose the second because the lack of an amicable partnership made continuing to work with her seem unrealistic. She said she had to learn to make sure that you and the person you are working with are on the same page before working together on a business.

She then set up an online clothes store with her sister, but she eventually gave this up because it was not generating enough revenue. She also started a food stand near Baguio’s main university, but this too failed because she was not prepared on how to run the ins and outs of making food in a cost-effective manner.

With this business, she finally has success, though. She started in February of last year. On her opening day, she made 3,000 Filipino pesos (about USD $32) and the next day 6,000 pesos (about $64). She broke even from her starting expenses 3-4 months in. She generally makes about 30,000 pesos (or $320) a month, which is good enough to get by on. She tends to sell out on her food everyday with a line of customers going around the corner of her block during peak hours, a clear sign of success.

She said she learned the lessons from her past businesses. She set this restaurant up by herself instead of getting anyone else involved. It’s next to a big grade school and gets a lot of business in weekday afternoons when the kids finish school. Her strategy is to sell significantly cheaper than other nearby restaurants so that she sells more of it, and it seems to be working.

Her restaurant is a single room that’s about a meter/yard wide and maybe 3 meters/yards long. That’s her kitchen full of her stove, cookingware, food, etc. In the front is a little wooden board facing the street where people come up and place their order. Once she makes it, she hands it to them, and they go on their way.

She works practically nonstop. She works six days a week except Sundays, her one day off. She wakes up at like 2:00 am or 3:00 am to buy her food for the day at the market. She then works until around 9:00 pm when she closes (but sometimes she closes earlier, closer to 8:00 or even 7:30 pm if she has already sold all her food).

I suggested she may need to take some time off to rest by eventually hiring an assistant to work some of the time instead of her. She said that moments during the day when she doesn’t have customers is her rest. She took a week-long vacation to go to Manila a few months ago as well.

Her plan is to save money to retire by at least 48 (she’s currently 37), even if that means hustling now. For retirement, she wants to go to the rural province where part of her family is from.

Many of her siblings work abroad, since wages are low in the Philippines. One is in Saudi Arabia; another Japan. Others have traveled to other bigger cities in the Philippines where they can make more money. She had a job offer for a white collar job in Thailand, and she refused it. She prefers staying here in Baguio with her parents. (In Filipino culture, often one daughter – generally the youngest – is expected to stay back with her parents.)

She also said she helps others. She said that when a person asking for food walks by, she gives it to them, giving them whichever dish they want. Similarly, she gives her leftovers to the street cleaning lady who comes by with a broom to sweep the street or sidewalk in the evening. She believes in karma, and that if you help others, you help make the world around you (the community, nature, etc.) a better place for yourself.

When Advancing Seems Hopeless (Life Snippet from Battambang, Cambodia)

This woman’s story seems to be a story of doing all one can to beat the odds and rise above the cycle of poverty. It’s part of Life Snippets Series, where as I travel the world, I compile glimpses into people’s lives around the world, what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context, and how they navigate the challenges of life. You can find more of these snippets here. For another snippet also from Cambodia but from someone with a very different position in life there, see this.

(Caveat: We spoke in 2023. I decided to maintain the present tense tone in this piece, but the present refers to the end of 2023.)

Chivy (not her real name) is from Battambang, Cambodia. Her dream is to start a restaurant, since she loves cooking and hospitality. She and her cousin recently co-founded a restaurant. It’s on the first floor of the same apartment building that her family (her mother, uncle, aunt, cousins, and her) rents the second floor of. But the business has been struggling.

She worked at her restaurant from 9:00 am until 3:00 pm everyday, and to make ends meet, she had a second job working the evening shift at a local bar as a barista from 3:00 pm until midnight. Her cousin works at their restaurant during the evenings until 10:00 pm when Chivy is gone.

The rental for her restaurant business costs $200 a month (Cambodia uses the US dollar as one of its currencies, so she’s paid in dollars), and her barista job pays her about $400 a month. She uses her second job to pay the rent for the restaurant and keeps the rest to contribute to rent for her home expenses for her and her family.

Battambang has been an important tourist destination until the covid pandemic. Then tourism stopped, causing huge hardship as most people in the small city lost their jobs. People working in tourism, food and beverage, and other service sector industries were the worst hit, because there were now few customers to pay for these services. When I was there, the pandemic had ended. Tourists were starting to come back, but not to anywhere near the same numbers they were before in Battambang and Cambodia, so restaurants still struggled to find customers.

At the same time, she is exhausted. She works fifteen hours a day with only has nine hours in the day to split between relaxation, any chores she needs, and sleep. She has one day off a week on Wednesdays. She says everyday she feels exhausted. Her friends have told her that she is slowly killing herself by overworking, and she suspects she can’t sustain this forever.

At the same time, she really wants her restaurant business to succeed. Her dream is to start a restaurant. Her cousin wants to throw in the towel, saying they haven’t gotten enough business to keep them afloat much longer, but she wants to keep trying. She hopes she can make it.

Both her and her cousin have been strategizing the best way to beat the odds and rise economically from their initial position, but they have found this incredibly difficult.

Chivy would like to move to the US, where she would work for at least 10 years. The greater income in the US (even if she works a low-income job in the US where she is barely scraping by while there) would allow her to save far more money than she’ll ever earn here working as, say, a barista. She would use that money to buy a home for her mother. The family would then craft that home into a homestay where they could rent out a few rooms to tourists and through that, build wealth to allow them to advance to the middle class in Battambang. She told me that moving to the US is a dream, though, that she knows will never realistically happen.

Likewise, her cousin has been trying to find a job in South Korea. She applied for a program the Cambodian government hosts to work there. The program pairs Cambodians with companies in South Korea, where they tend to work in a few different types of low-wage blue collar or service sector industries like manufacturing, agriculture, or if their Korean is considered good enough to interact with regular customers, food and beverage.

She had to take a series of exams to demonstrate her competency. She studied Korean for three months in order to prepare for an exam. She needed a score of 110 out of 200 to pass, and she scored 125. She also had to take a dexterity test, placing blocks in holes and other physical activities, which she also passed.

She is waiting to see whether a Korean employer will choose her. She is pessimistic that she’ll get an offer, though. Korea’s program has 400 slots for Cambodians, and about 2,000-3,000 Cambodians apply for these 400 slots. She said they mostly select men in their twenties for factory work, the industry that would be most likely to hire her, so as a 33-year old woman, they may not pick her.

If she does get a job offer, most contracts are for two years, although some stay for as long as five years in total after renewing it a few times. The typical pay is $2,000 a month in Korea, which would also allow her to save to buy a home to use as a homestay. If this doesn’t work out, though, she may move to Siem Reap (a major tourist city next to the famous Angkor Wat) where tourist and food and beverage jobs are more plentiful.

Chivy’s and her cousin’s stories demonstrate the complexities of trying to advance economically in small cities and towns in Cambodia. Other residents in Battambang have told me the area can feel almost feudal with class mobility being very difficult and people becoming locked into their station in life. This shows how difficult it can be to change that.

Even the best entrepreneurial endeavors are likely to fail and options feeling limited, causing them to look to other parts of the world where they can work and save money, but these options are also limited. It’s easy to feel sad and stuck, and even working 15 hour days may not be enough to cut it to create one’s dreams.

Reclaiming a Quiet Life (Life Journey in Sandakan, Malaysia)

(This is part of Life Snippets Series, where as I travel the world, I compile glimpses into people’s lives around the world, what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context, and how they navigate the challenges of life. You can find more of these snippets here.)

She is originally from Brunei but had recently decided to move to Sandakan in Borneo, Malaysia. Her father is from Brunei, and her mother from Sabah/Malaysia. Her dad has decided to retire here in Sundakan. She now works for Grab, the most popular ride-sharing app in Southeast Asia pretty similar to Uber, and she was my driver one afternoon. That’s how we met.

She is the youngest daughter, so her parents expect her to stay back and help take care of them (a common expectation of youngest daughters across Southeast Asia). She doesn’t mind this. She likes staying with her family and finds their expectations reasonable.

She studied medical laboratory studies at university, and she worked in that field in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia’s big city) until the covid pandemic caused her to get laid off. She then did unrelated office work still in Kuala Lumpur. She said overall covid really hurt Malaysia’s economy, and it’s been struggling since. She was laid off at two different jobs during the pandemic.

Her last job in Kuala Lumpur ended about a month ago this January. She came back to stay with her family here in Sandakan, a small city on the eastern side of Malaysian’s Borneo. She loves it here. It’s so much less stressful, and things are cheap here (much cheaper than in either Kuala Lumpur or Brunei). She enjoys working for Grab because she can choose her own hours and still make enough to pay for things.

She said that here in Sandakan a really nice apartment (furnished and with things like AC) costs about 1,700 ringgit per month (about $425 a month), but there are even cheaper ones for about 1,200 ringgit (or $300) per month. Here she can afford her own place and her own car, so she doesn’t have to live with her parents. She plans to stay here for about a year.

When I asked her whether she felt happy and content with the life that she has built for herself so far, she said that she feels like some of her needs aren’t being met. She mentioned that she probably needs a vacation and said her next scheduled vacation is in August, a trip to Bali with her boyfriend and her cousins.

Sleeping with “Bar Women” in Siem Reap, Cambodia as a Way to Meet Someone (A Conversation)

One morning while I was getting breakfast in Siem Reap, Cambodia I had a long conversation with a white US American living there. For anyone unfamiliar, Siem Reap is a small, tourist city in Central Cambodia withu a population of around 350,000 most known for the absolutely amazing Angkor Wat ruins, one of the marvels of the world.

This account is just one perspective on complex dynamics between Western men and Southeast Asian women. It exemplifies the types of inequalities and power dynamics in these kinds of relationships and how both he and the Cambodian women he have met navigate these relationships.

The guy had lived in Siem Reap for about 7 months. He is deciding whether to settle here long-term or go back home. He says he has everything he wants in life (such as a nice home, food to eat, etc.) except for a woman.

He has gotten frustrated, though, with the transactional interactions he’s had so far with Cambodian women here. He’ll meet different women at bars, take them home, sleep with them that night, intending for them to be a one-night stand. But then the next morning, they ask for money. He says the amount of money they ask for is not much, but he finds it insulting. It makes him think, “I thought the woman was simply interested in me, but then I realize, ‘Oh that’s what kind of relationship this is.’” He also said he usually meets “bar women” or women who specifically go to bars to meet guys there, which to him are “like this.”

He said he felt frustrated in the US with having to pretend to like people’s personalities or have someone play a wingman in order to get to sleep with them. In Cambodia, he can say, “I think you look pretty; do you also think I’m attractive? Okay,” and go have sex. He also likes that women are more upfront about complimenting his body, for example strangers telling him he looks attractive.

In contrast, he got frustrated with how in the US, women are selective and would seem to judge him on things like his job and salary (he worked a blue collar job often labeled as “lower status”). Here he is comparatively more desired. He admits that Cambodian men seem to have it harder than white men such as himself, though. They often have to go through several hoops like justifying their career path if their work is considered menial.

In his opinion, Cambodians require less in life here in Siem Reap: often just wanting a place to sleep, enough food to eat, and a motorbike to get around. For him, people do not seem to know what they are lacking materially: if they lived in a Western country, they would own so much more monetary wealth and material stuff. But to him, this ignorance prevents many in rural Cambodia from seeing what they lack, lowering the material standards of what a “successful life” looks like, almost like a coping mechanism. (Note: This is his opinion. I do not agree that rural Cambodians do not know what they are “lacking” but find the reasons for these differences in cultural expectations for material things to be a bit more complicated.)

Thus, when the women he sleeps with asks him for things, he can hardly fault them for their request. They are often asking for basic needs like food, and compared to the US, what they are asking for is not that expensive. At the same time, the requests make him feel uneasy

I found it interesting talking with him. I could relate to the frustrations and hurt about having people so frequently ask you for money, but it seemed like he was in some way using his status given to white men in that community to have one-sided, short-term sexual encounters. One-night stands are okay when both sides reasonably know and agree on what to expect, yet I sensed that the women he was having sex with had very different expectations and assumptions than him, seeing the sex as a beginning of a relationship, not just something they are doing that night.

Because of his privilege, he could enforce his expectations that this was a brief sexual encounter. He obviously controlled whether he helped others financially, and he could move on to another woman if this woman had what he considered too unreasonable an expectation. That allowed him to satisfy his own desires (both for sex and to be complemented for his attractiveness). To me, this seemed like a vain and ultimately self-defeating approach for finding satisfaction emotionally, relationally, and even sexually.

I found it sad. He seemed to have some kind of insecurity, which he sought to satisfy by continually having sex with different Cambodian women and seemed either oblivious or indifferent to how that subtly positioned the women as a type of object for him. Then he got frustrated by the ways those women tried to respond within that.

These kinds of cross-cultural relationships can be complicated to navigate, though, especially given differences in power. Everyone has expectations for how to interact, which are influenced by one’s cultural context, and when in another culture, it’s definitely okay to communicate your expectations and find people who respect and abide by your expectations. At the same time, it’s important to be aware of where others are coming from and to be aware of how your power and privilege may unfairly impact the situation. I think he simply felt frustrated with how the women did not abide by his expectations, moving swiftly to get what he wanted without thinking through what their encounter must have looked like from their perspective and how his power and privilege shaped the interaction itself.

This kind of obliviousness can be common among those who are in a position of power in society: particularly white men in other cultures. It can also make one think about how positions of power could lead to similar ignorance in our own lives.