There’s a particular kind of comfort in rock bottom, or at least what feels like rock bottom at the time. You’re sitting in the wreckage of whatever just collapsed—a relationship, a job, your health, your carefully laid plans—and everything feels irredeemably terrible. But here’s the thing that’s both maddening and oddly reassuring: it could always be worse.I know how that sounds. When you’re struggling, the last thing you want to hear is someone cheerfully reminding you that other people have it harder. That’s not what this is about. This isn’t about minimizing your pain or pretending that suffering is some kind of competition where only the person in last place gets to complain. Your difficulties are real, and they matter.
But there’s a strange power in recognizing that even in our darkest moments, we’re rarely at the absolute bottom. You lost your job? At least you weren’t also diagnosed with a serious illness on the same day. Your relationship ended badly? At least your house didn’t burn down in the same week. Your house did burn down? At least everyone got out safely. These aren’t hollow consolations—they’re reminders that life has layers of difficulty, and acknowledging that you’re not on the worst possible layer doesn’t mean you’re not on a pretty terrible one.The ancient Stoics understood this deeply. They practiced something called “negative visualization,” where they’d regularly imagine everything going wrong. Not because they were pessimists, but because it helped them appreciate what they had and prepared them psychologically for loss. When you’ve already mentally walked through the worst-case scenario, the merely bad scenario becomes more manageable. Your imagination has already visited someplace darker, so where you actually are doesn’t seem quite so terrifying.
Consider how quickly circumstances can shift. You’re stuck in traffic, furious about missing an important meeting, and then you see the accident that caused the backup. Suddenly your anger transforms into relief. You’re not the person being loaded into the ambulance. Your bad morning is still bad, but it’s no longer the worst thing happening on that stretch of highway. This isn’t about feeling smug or superior—it’s about perspective snapping into focus.
The “it could be worse” mindset isn’t about toxic positivity or forcing yourself to be grateful when you’re genuinely suffering. It’s not about pretending everything is fine or dismissing legitimate grievances. Instead, it’s about maintaining your grip on reality. Because the reality is that life exists on a spectrum of difficulty, and most of us, most of the time, are somewhere in the middle rather than at the extremes.
When you’re going through something hard, your brain has a tendency to catastrophize. Psychologists call this “magnification”—you take your current problem and mentally inflate it until it fills your entire field of vision. Everything becomes about this one thing. You can’t imagine a future where this problem isn’t the defining feature of your existence. But stepping back and honestly asking yourself “could this be worse?” is a way of deflating that magnification. Yes, it could be worse. That means there’s still room to fall, but it also means you haven’t fallen all the way.
There’s also something liberating about accepting that worse things could happen. It means you stop trying to control every variable, stop living in constant fear of the next shoe dropping. The shoe might drop. In fact, many shoes might drop. But you’ll deal with them when they do, just as you’re dealing with whatever you’re facing right now. Recognizing that things could deteriorate further doesn’t mean they will—it just means you’re clear-eyed about the nature of existence.
This perspective becomes especially valuable during prolonged difficulties. When you’re in month six of unemployment, month two of a painful recovery, or year three of a challenging situation, it’s easy to feel like you’re in a uniquely terrible position. But pause and consider: you still have your faculties, people who care about you, a place to sleep, another day to try again. These aren’t small things, even if they feel insufficient in the moment.
The trick is using this perspective without weaponizing it against yourself or others. “It could be worse” should never become “I don’t have the right to feel bad.” You absolutely have the right to feel bad. Pain is pain, and struggle is struggle. But alongside that pain, you can hold the knowledge that you’re still standing, still capable, still here. The situation hasn’t consumed you entirely, even if it feels like it has.
Think of it as emotional ballast. When storms hit, ships need weight in the right places to stay upright. “It could be worse” is that kind of weight—not something that drags you down, but something that keeps you from capsizing completely when the waves get rough. It’s a tether to the fact that there are gradations of difficulty, and whatever you’re experiencing, as awful as it is, exists in a context where worse outcomes were possible and didn’t happen.
This doesn’t mean you should accept bad situations without trying to improve them. Recognizing that something could be worse isn’t the same as deciding it’s good enough. You can simultaneously acknowledge that you’re not at rock bottom while still working desperately to climb higher. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.In the end, “it could always be worse” is less about comparison and more about resilience. It’s a reminder that you’ve survived everything that’s happened to you so far, including things you once thought would destroy you. It’s an acknowledgment that life has already not thrown certain terrible things your way. And it’s a quiet assertion that if things did get worse, you’d probably find a way to survive that too.
When everything feels like it’s falling apart, this perspective doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t make the problems disappear or the pain stop. But it does give you a foothold, a tiny ledge to stand on while you figure out your next move. And sometimes, that’s exactly what you need—not a solution, but a reminder that you’re not free-falling into an abyss. You’re somewhere specific on the spectrum of human difficulty, and that somewhere, as bad as it is, could still be somewhere worse.