• Poverty taught us how to survive, but we can’t spend the rest of our lives proving that we can take pain.
  • We deserve to breathe without guilt, to rest without feeling lazy and to succeed without first suffering.

Somewhere along the way, we started believing that pain makes us worthy. That if something comes easy, it’s probably not meant for us. I don’t know who taught us that, but I’m starting to realize poverty had a lot to do with it.

Many of us grew up watching people work themselves to the bone; parents who woke up before dawn, neighbors who juggled three jobs, relatives who said hustle hard now, rest later.

And because struggle was all we saw, it became our definition of success. We started to believe that suffering was a normal part of life, something to be proud of, even when it was killing us.

Now, look around. We praise people for grinding non stop. We celebrate burnout as if it’s a character trait. We say no pain, no gain like it is a life motto. But if you look closer, it’s not always strength. Sometimes, it’s survival, sometimes fear, that if we rest, everything we’ve built will collapse.

It’s not our fault. Poverty forced us to make pain look poetic. We had to find beauty in the struggle because that’s all we had. We learned to say we move regardless even when we were falling apart. We learned to smile through lack because that was the only way to stay sane. And over time, we started calling that strength.

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  3. Why Poverty Persists: Insights from the World Bank and UN Reports

But maybe it’s time to admit that strength shouldn’t always hurt. That peace isn’t laziness. That soft life isn’t pride; it’s healing. Because deep down, we all want rest, not another reason to prove how much we can endure.

I think we’ve romanticized suffering for so long that joy now feels suspicious. When life gets easy, we get anxious, like we’re waiting for something bad to happen. When someone chooses ease, we call them spoiled or unserious. It’s almost as if peace has become a priviledge we think we don’t deserve.

Maybe the real rebellion now is to unlearn all that. To stop glorifying struggle and start respecting rest. To stop wearing pain like identity and start choosing peace on purpose.

Poverty taught us how to survive, but we can’t spend the rest of our lives proving that we can take pain.

We deserve to breathe without guilt, to rest without feeling lazy and to succeed without first suffering.

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