The Comfort of Fear

When Privilege Masks as Protection

Since finding myself in this new chapter of life, tied by love, bound sometimes by obligation, I’ve often ended up in rooms I wouldn’t have chosen. I share the complexities of this in a recent piece:

Holding Both Worlds at Once

In all kinds of settings- over wine at a long dinner table, during a polite lull at an arts event, in quiet moments between speeches or small talk- the conversations surface. Sometimes it’s in the soft interval between courses; sometimes whispered during an intermission, or shared casually on manicured lawns under dappled light. Although the spaces shift, they are all immaculately curated, comfortable, composed, and not ones I’d ever naturally inhabit, but ones I’ve found myself in.

And within them, what’s spoken often carries a quiet certainty. A kind of polished, well-rehearsed ease. But beneath the elegance and comfortability, there’s something more jarring, a fear that feels strangely misplaced, spoken aloud as fact, but bred from something far more fragile.

There’s this undercurrent of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. This readiness to believe that safety is scarce and must be guarded. That “we” are under threat from people who look different, who speak differently, who flee danger rather than prepare for it.

I’ve sat through these conversations, and what stays with me isn’t just the discomfort.

It’s the irony.

These are people who, in other breaths, talk about stocking up their emergency pantry, just in case. Planning for disruption. Lining shelves with long-life food and bottled water, and batteries, “because you never know.” There’s talk of motion sensors, CCTV, backup generators, home insurance for floods and fire.

I’ve heard anxiety about climate instability, about rising premiums, deep reminiscences about pandemic border closures and the scramble to get home before things shut down.

And within these conversations, the stress is real. The worry met with nods and sympathy. But I sit there thinking, isn’t this the same instinct?

The desire to be safe. The drive to protect your family. The fear that you could lose everything if you’re not prepared. Isn’t this exactly what drives people to flee, to move, to cross borders and take risks and hold their children close through impossibilities?

The difference, of course, is proximity. When it’s you and your family, it’s relatable. When it’s someone else, someone far away, or foreign, of a different creed or race, or poor, it becomes a threat. Something to politicise. Something to criminalise. Something to strip of its humanity.

This is what disturbs me. Not ignorance. Not even fear itself. But willful disconnection from people who have every means to know better. Who are educated, who are informed, who have access to nuance and context and yet choose the simplest, harshest narratives.

Those who choose to consume news that dehumanises others and walk away feeling validated, not questioned.

Those who choose to absorb and repeat the loudest voices in the room: headlines built on outrage, soundbites designed to provoke, and media cycles that rely on division to drive engagement. This is inflammatory rhetoric at work, language that’s intentionally charged, designed to spark fear, to create an “us” and a “them.”

And when that rhetoric is parroted over dinner, when it's shared in group chats, when it shapes votes, it’s not just passive opinion. It becomes complicit. It fuels policies and narratives that do real harm. It widens the gap between those in comfort and those fighting to survive for their basic human rights.

Let me be clear, this is not a criticism of those without access. There are people who simply haven’t had the chance to learn more. Who are surviving themselves, and haven’t been given the tools to look further than what’s right in front of them. That’s a systemic failure of education, of media, of opportunity, and it deserves compassion and understanding.

But this is not about them.

This is about those who do have access. Those who live in suburbs with top-tier schools and libraries, who hold degrees, who travel freely, who have every digital tool at their fingertips, and still choose ignorance. Still choose to fear, to ‘other’, to judge. Because the alternative, learning, unlearning, acknowledging privilege, feels uncomfortable.

And comfort is the currency they refuse to give up.

In these postcodes, the ones buffered by private security and curated newsfeeds, it becomes easy to forget the world isn’t always like this. That safety isn’t a guarantee. That survival isn’t political.

There’s a kind of postcode lottery of empathy, where distance protects you not only from danger, but from having to care.

But that distance is an illusion. Because what’s happening “over there” isn’t separate from here. Climate collapse, political instability, and displacement- these forces don’t check passports before arriving. And one day, when comfort is no longer guaranteed, what stories will we tell then? Who will we expect to understand us?

What’s happening to people fleeing violence, persecution, and climate disaster isn’t hypothetical. It’s not a debate. It’s real. It’s happening now. And if we can stock emergency pantries, install motion sensors, and fear being locked out of our home state during a pandemic, then we understand the instinct to protect.

The difference is that it’s always abstract, manageable, and buffered by comfort.

We just pretend we don’t understand when the person fleeing doesn’t look like us. And that’s the irony; that we prepare for the worst and fear others doing the same.

If we can’t see that, if we can’t connect the dots between our own desire for safety and someone else’s desperate need for it, then we’ve let comfort blind us to our own humanity.

So when scenes of crisis appear at the edges of our screens, boats crowded with families, refugee camps stretching beyond the frame, or bodies washed ashore, the response is rarely empathy. More often, it’s discomfort, outrage, or even celebration for the latest round of harsher policies.

“It’s about time,” someone might say, as boats are turned away or destroyed mid-crossing. And I sit there, watching that reaction, feeling gutted. Because it reveals how deeply we’ve desensitised and normalised the idea that some lives are just not worth saving.

That’s what I want to bring forth. Not to shame, but to illuminate.

Because there’s a terrifying hypocrisy in preparing for disaster while condemning those who are already in it. There’s something so hollow about talking earnestly of being prepared, stocking emergency supplies, upgrading insurance “just in case,” investing in properties in safer regions, mapping out exit strategies if things ever “go south”, all while showing such little understanding, or worse, contempt, for those already living that reality and chastising others for trying to survive.

And there’s something deeply broken about needing to protect your comfort so badly that you can’t see someone else’s suffering as real, or as worthy.

These conversations, these headlines, these policies, they’re not just happening “out there.” They shape the atmosphere around the table. They shape what gets said, and what doesn’t, what becomes normal and what becomes tolerable.

And that’s what lingers long after the room has quietened. Not just the words themselves, but the silence that follows them; the casual ease of it all. The way comfort dulls compassion. How fear, repeated often enough, becomes default. This kind of comfort doesn’t just soften the edges, it blunts empathy. It flattens complexity. It renders whole groups of people invisible, unworthy, and disposable.

And that’s the real danger.

I don’t claim to have all the answers. But I do know that fear shouldn’t make us cruel. And comfort shouldn’t make us blind.

Because if we can’t connect the dots between our own desire for safety and someone else’s desperate need for it, then maybe the threat isn’t coming from outside at all.

Maybe it lives in the walls we build within ourselves.

And with privilege, especially this kind, the kind that comes with choices and space and access, comes a responsibility. Not to remain comfortable. Not to stay silent. And to use that privilege not as a shield, not to deflect, defend, or distance, but as a bridge. Toward understanding. Toward empathy. Toward something better than this.