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When Hardship Becomes a Badge of Honour: The Hidden Cost of Normalising Suffering

2 days ago
8 min read

We are often reminded that life is hard, that pain is inevitable, and that suffering is simply part of being human. We also hear that nothing worthwhile comes easy, that success requires sacrifice, that the harder the climb the better the view, that difficult experiences build character and that the people who have struggled the most often appreciate life the most. There is truth in the idea that life will contain difficulty, and while we cannot protect ourselves from every disappointment, loss, failure, uncertainty or painful experience, because some suffering is an unavoidable part of being human, but there is a crucial difference between accepting that life inevitably contains difficulty and accepting avoidable suffering as inevitable.



We are told that a student struggling through a demanding course is experiencing difficulty, but a student being expected to live in an unsafe or degrading building is experiencing something that should not simply be accepted as part of education. We are told that a young professional working hard to establish themselves may have to make sacrifices, but being underpaid, exploited or subjected to abusive working conditions is not an inevitable requirement of building a career. A caregiver may inevitably experience tiredness and emotional strain, but in reality being left without adequate support because "that's what caregiving is" is a failure of the systems not how caregiving should be. - The distinction matters because once we start treating all suffering as simply "part of life," we stop asking an important question: does this suffering actually have to exist?


We cannot eliminate hardship from human life, but we can eliminate, reduce and prevent a great deal of the suffering that comes from neglect, exploitation, unsafe environments, inadequate infrastructure and systems that fail the people who depend on them.


This is perhaps where our cultural obsession with struggle becomes increasingly dangerous. When we repeatedly tell people that "life is hard," we often begin using that truth to justify conditions that do not need to be hard at all. When we say that "everyone has to struggle," we may find ourselves stopping to question why some people are being made to struggle unnecessarily... because when suffering becomes normalised, we often stop seeing it as something that needs to be changed.


The recent tragedy in Delhi's Satya Niketan brings this question into painful focus. The collapse of a building being used as student accommodation, in which several lives were lost, has raised serious questions about safety, construction and the conditions in which students are living away from home. But beyond the immediate questions of accountability lies a much larger one: what have we collectively decided students should simply endure in the pursuit of education and a better future? - For many students, especially those living away from home, inadequate accommodation can become an accepted part of student life. Cramped rooms, poor sanitation, inadequate or substandard food, unreliable facilities, lack of privacy, unsafe buildings and exploitative landlords may be treated not as failures of infrastructure or regulation, but as unfortunate realities that students simply have to put up with. Tragically, sometimes, students themselves begin to believe this. They begin to internalise narrratives like 'This is just how student life is', 'Everyone has to struggle', I'm here to study, not to be comfortable', or even 'It will all be worth it when I graduate/ make it big'.

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These thoughts may sound resilient, but they can also teach a young person to distrust their own discomfort - A student who feels unsafe or degraded may begin to wonder whether they are being unreasonable for wanting better, or someone who is exhausted by their circumstances may compare themselves with people who have it worse and conclude that they have no right to complain. This is where the mental health dimension becomes particularly important. When we repeatedly tell people that suffering is normal, we can inadvertently teach them that their distress is not a signal that something needs to change, but rather simply something they need to become strong enough to tolerate. And when enough people believe that, something else happens: we simply stop questioning the systems producing the suffering.


If poor hostel conditions are simply "part of student life," why demand better accommodation? If exploitative internships are simply "how you get your foot in the door," why question unpaid labour? If unreasonable working hours are merely "the price of building a career," why ask employers to create healthier workplaces? If caregivers are exhausted because "caregiving is hard," why ask where the support systems are that could make caregiving sustainable? - Normalising suffering can quietly shift responsibility from the broken systems to the individual, with the person struggling becomes the problem to be fixed. It is looked at as though they need more resilience, better coping skills, a thicker skin, more patience, or even more gratitude. Meanwhile, the conditions and broken systems around them which are actually contributing to, if not directly causing the suffering remain untouched.


This is particularly important from a mental health len because distress is not always an individual malfunction. Sometimes distress is an entirely understandable response to an environment that is unsafe, exploitative, unstable or dehumanising. We should absolutely help people develop coping mechanisms for circumstances they cannot immediately change, but coping cannot become a substitute for circumstances that can and should be changed.


There is a tendency to romanticise struggle because of the stories we tell about success. We admire the person who worked eighteen-hour days, survived on very little sleep, lived in terrible accommodation, accepted inadequate pay, endured humiliation from a boss or went without support because they were determined to "make it." Their suffering becomes part of the success story. The question we really need to pause and ask here is: But why should it? - A difficult examination does not need to come with an unsafe hostel. A demanding degree does not require a student to live without dignity. A first job can be challenging without being abusive. An internship can be educational without becoming exploitative. Ambition does not become more admirable because someone had to suffer unnecessarily on the way to achieving it.


We need to reclaim the word struggle from this confusion. Struggle can mean perseverance, learning something difficult, recovering from failure, adapting to change or continuing towards a meaningful goal despite setbacks. These are experiences that can genuinely build confidence and agency. But suffering caused by neglect, exploitation, unsafe infrastructure, inadequate support or the deliberate withholding of fair conditions is something else. It is certainly not a character-building exercise simply because someone eventually survives it.


The other tragedy with this cultural perception around struggling and suffering is that does not disappear once students graduate, it continues to follow them into adulthood. In work settings, it appears in toxic workplaces where employees are told that unreasonable hours are how they prove their commitment. It appears in exploitative internships where people are expected to be grateful for "exposure." It appears when underpayment is defended as paying one's dues. It appears when people are made to feel that asking for reasonable working conditions means they lack ambition. It appears when someone is told that burnout is simply what happens when you are serious about your career.


In caregiving settings, it appears perhaps in one of its most emotionally powerful forms. Caregiving is difficult, and there is no need to pretend otherwise, but we have also created a culture in which exhaustion can become evidence of love - A parent who is completely depleted, a daughter or son who has given up every part of their life to care for a family member, or a caregiver who refuses to ask for help may be praised for their sacrifice rather than asked what support they need. Sometimes, wanting rest can feel selfish, wanting respite can feel like failure, and wanting to set boundaries can feel like a betrayal; but love should not have to be measured by how completely someone disappears into their responsibilities. We can honour caregiving without romanticising caregiver exhaustion, and we can value sacrifice without making self-destruction the benchmark of devotion.


Across all these examples, the same cultural message keeps resurfacing: if you really want something, you should be willing to suffer for it. But can we pause to think, what happens when we take that idea too far? - We begin confusing deprivation with discipline, exhaustion with dedication, endurance with strength, silence with maturity, self-denial with virtue, and perhaps most dangerously, we begin believing that if someone else managed to survive difficult conditions, those conditions must somehow have been necessary. But the truth is, they weren't necessarily.


Someone surviving an unsafe hostel does not prove that unsafe hostels are an inevitable part of education. Someone surviving a toxic workplace does not prove that toxic workplaces are necessary for professional growth. Someone burning themselves out to care for a family member does not prove that burnout is the natural price of love. Sometimes, it simply proves that people are remarkably capable of surviving circumstances that should never have been imposed upon them.


However, none of this means we can enitrely eliminate suffering from human life - we simply cannot. People will lose people they love, plans will fail, bodies will age, relationships will end, friendships will fall apart, dreams will change. There will be grief, uncertainty and pain that no policy, institution or support system can completely remove, and that is precisely why we should be more determined to eliminate the suffering that is within our power to prevent. If a building can be made safer, it should be made safer. If student accommodation can be regulated better, it should be. If workplaces can provide humane hours and fair compensation, they should. If caregivers can receive respite and support, they should. If young people can be given dignity while they pursue ambitious futures, why would we ask them to settle for less?


We need to stop treating the ability to endure poor conditions as proof that those conditions are acceptable, because when we tell people, again and again, that "life is hard," we risk making hardship into a justification rather than a reality to be addressed. We stop asking whether systems are failing and stop demanding that failing systems become better. Instead, we start asking vulnerable people to become better at surviving them. That is not resilience. Sometimes, it is simply resignation dressed up as strength.


Moving forward, the goal should not be to build a society in which people become exceptionally good at tolerating suffering; it should be to build one in which fewer people have to suffer unnecessarily in the first place.


We can teach perseverance without glorifying deprivation. We can prepare young people for life's difficulties without teaching them that every difficult condition is something they must accept. We can celebrate resilience while still asking why resilience was required. Because there is a profound difference between saying, "Some things in life will be hard," and saying, "If it isn't hard, it isn't worth having." - The first prepares us for reality, while the second can teach us to tolerate what should have been changed; and perhaps it is time we pause at an harder thought: It is not how much suffering people can endure, but how much suffering we have the power and the responsibility to prevent, because that not just impacts people's mental health, but sometimes can even determine their survival.



Written by: Vedica Podar



September, 2026

 
 
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