You ever notice when you tell somebody something that might actually help them—advice from your own life, something you struggled with, figured out, and did to better yourself—the first response is, “Well, it was easier back then.”
That’s bullshit.
It wasn’t easier. It was different.
If it had been easy for me, I wouldn’t have had to figure out how to overcome it in the first place. I didn’t magically get handed a life with no obstacles just because it happened 10, 20, or 30 years ago. I had bills. I had responsibilities. I had kids. I had setbacks. I had times when I didn’t know how in the hell I was going to make something work. And somehow, I figured it out.
Were things cheaper? Some things were. You know what else was cheaper? My paycheck.
Did we have different opportunities? Sure. We also didn’t have half the resources people have today. There wasn’t an app for everything. You couldn’t Google how to do something, apply for 20 jobs from your couch, work remotely, have groceries delivered, start a side business online, or find a YouTube video showing you step-by-step how to do practically anything.
Every generation has advantages the generation before it didn’t have, and every generation gets handed a brand-new pile of problems to go with them.
That’s life.
So when somebody who has already climbed over an obstacle tells you what worked for them, maybe instead of immediately explaining why you can’t possibly do it because they had it easier, listen to what they’re actually saying. Their exact solution may not fit your life perfectly. Adjust it. Change it. Find the modern-day version of it.
But don’t dismiss the lesson just because it came from a different time.
Sometimes “it was easier back then” really means, “I don’t want to hear that fixing this might require me to do something hard.”
Times change. Circumstances change. The details change.
But hard has always been hard. And excuses have always been easier.
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