There’s a certain flavour of comment that usually only comes from people who’ve never really been through anything too tough or traumatic.
They mean well (sometimes, anyway), but when you’ve actually faced any tests of love, patience, and strength in life, hearing these kinds of phrases can feel less like advice and more like a reminder of just how far apart your experiences are. If you’ve ever had to smile through gritted teeth while someone said one of these, you’re not imagining it—they just don’t get it.
1. “You just have to stay positive!”
Staying hopeful has its place, but when life is genuinely hard, being told to just slap on a smile feels insulting. It completely skips past the actual reality someone’s living through, like optimism alone can magic away structural problems, grief, or deep exhaustion. People who haven’t struggled tend to think positivity is a fix-all. People who have struggled know that sometimes, surviving another day is positivity enough.
2. “If you really wanted it, you’d find a way.”
This comment ignores how much luck, opportunity, and circumstance play into success. It’s not just about grit—sometimes systems are rigged, doors are closed, and you’re running a race with a broken leg while other people get a head start. When someone casually says this, it reveals they’ve likely never had to navigate invisible barriers. Wanting something badly doesn’t always mean you can bulldoze your way through real-world limits.
3. “Money isn’t everything.”
Easy to say when you’ve always had enough of it. When you’ve never had to choose between rent and food, money might seem like an abstract “nice to have” rather than the difference between security and survival. People who’ve struggled know that money isn’t everything, but it’s a hell of a lot when you don’t have it. Safety, dignity, freedom—money touches it all whether you want it to or not.
4. “Hard work always pays off.”
It’s a nice fairy tale, but it’s not the full story. Plenty of people work themselves into the ground and still barely scrape by, while others coast into cushy positions through connections and luck. Hard work matters, absolutely. But pretending it’s the only factor glosses over massive realities about inequality, timing, and privilege that shape the real outcomes behind the scenes.
5. “You just need to want it badly enough.”
Similar to “work harder,” this idea makes failure feel like a personal flaw instead of something influenced by a thousand external factors. As if wanting something magically erases debt, discrimination, illness, or family obligations. Wanting something fiercely is admirable. However, life isn’t a vending machine where you insert enough “want” and a prize pops out. Reality’s a bit messier than that.
6. “Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day.”
This sounds empowering until you realise it completely ignores realities like single parenthood, chronic illness, poverty, or systemic barriers. Technically, yes—everyone has 24 hours. But what they’re free to do with those hours looks wildly different depending on the hand they’ve been dealt. If you don’t have to trade sleep for survival, your day looks very different from someone who’s juggling five jobs just to stay afloat.
7. “Just manifest it!”
Manifestation has its place in visualisation and setting intentions, but telling someone deep in hardship to just “manifest” a better life skips over real-world problems that can’t be wished away. Not everything can be vision-boarded into existence. Sometimes, the road to change is long, unfair, and brutal, and no amount of good vibes cancels that out.
8. “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps.”
Usually said by people who had a lot more boots, straps, and hidden support systems than they like to admit. It frames success as pure personal merit while conveniently forgetting the safety nets that made risks survivable. True struggle makes you humble, not smug. People who really pulled themselves through hard times tend to have a lot more compassion, and a lot less superiority.
9. “You’re just not trying hard enough.”
One of the most tone-deaf things you can say to someone already stretched to breaking. Struggling isn’t always a sign of laziness. In reality, it’s often a sign that someone’s already giving more than they can afford to. It’s easy to say “try harder” when you’ve never had to juggle impossible choices just to survive the day. Real effort isn’t always visible to the outside world.
10. “Everything happens for a reason.”
This sounds comforting if you’ve never lost everything you care about for no reason at all. It’s a tidy bow people like to tie onto suffering so they don’t have to sit with the discomfort of it. Sometimes things just happen—painfully, randomly, unfairly. Growth can come later, but pretending everything was part of a neat master plan feels deeply out of touch to people still bleeding from it.
11. “Just take a break and everything will feel better.”
When the problem is burnout from overwork, systemic pressure, or sheer survival mode, a weekend off doesn’t magically reset everything. Taking a breather helps, but it doesn’t dismantle what’s causing the exhaustion in the first place. If all it took was a nap and a bubble bath, a lot more people would already be thriving. Rest matters, for sure, but it’s not a substitute for safety, fairness, or proper support.
12. “It’s all about mindset.”
Mindset helps, but it’s not the only ingredient for change. This turns structural issues into personal failures, as if thinking happy thoughts is enough to overcome discrimination, trauma, or financial instability. A strong mindset can carry you far, but pretending it can do the whole job alone is naive at best and cruel at worst.
13. “You should have planned better.”
Planning helps when life is predictable. When it’s not—when a single medical bill, a lost job, or an unexpected crisis can wipe you out—no spreadsheet in the world saves you. People who haven’t lived pay cheque to pay cheque love to assume that hardship is a planning problem, not a reality problem. Life isn’t always a neat, controllable system no matter how much you budget.
14. “You’re just making excuses.”
When someone opens up about barriers they face and gets dismissed as “making excuses,” it shuts down any real conversation. It says, “I don’t want to hear your reality if it makes me uncomfortable.” Struggling isn’t the same as giving up. Talking about obstacles isn’t the same as refusing to try. Sometimes it’s just telling the truth about how hard it really is.
15. “I never needed therapy, and I turned out fine.”
This is the emotional equivalent of “I survived without seatbelts.” Just because someone managed to power through without support doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have benefited from it, or that everyone else should white-knuckle their way through trauma too. Therapy isn’t weakness. It’s care. Bragging about not needing it says more about the scars someone’s hiding than about their strength.
16. “If I can do it, anyone can.”
Everyone’s path is different. Saying “if I can, you can” assumes all things were equal from the start—which they rarely, if ever, are. Privilege, timing, connections, and pure chance play massive roles. What helped you might not be available to someone else. It’s okay to celebrate your wins, but it’s also okay to recognise they weren’t built in a vacuum.
