There is a particular kind of confidence that grows only in soil that has never been tested by drought. It is the assurance of those who have always had someone to call, always known where the next meal would come from, always operated with the safety net of family or friends or simply the absence of true desperation. This confidence is not wisdom, though it is often mistaken for it. It is the luxury of never having been truly alone, never having watched a bill arrive with no means to pay it, never having felt the particular silence of a room where no one is coming to help. And it is from this place of unearned security that some of the loudest judgments in our society are issued, wrapped in the language of personal responsibility and moral superiority.
It is easy to believe in the power of positive thinking when you have never lain awake at three in the morning calculating whether you can afford both groceries and the electricity bill. It is simple to advocate for bootstraps and hustle culture when the boots were purchased by someone else and the ladder has always been within reach. The person who has never been alone cannot truly comprehend the psychological weight of isolation, the way it warps decision-making and drains the energy required for self-improvement. They have not experienced the cognitive toll of financial precarity, where the constant arithmetic of survival leaves no mental bandwidth for long-term planning or skill development. Yet they speak with authority about what the struggling should do, how they should think, where they have failed.
This is not to say that those with support networks or financial stability have nothing valuable to contribute to conversations about hardship. But there is a profound difference between offering perspective and issuing decrees, between sharing what worked in your context and assuming your context is universal. The person who has never been alone may offer advice about networking or mentorship without grasping that such relationships require social capital they have always possessed. They may suggest cutting expenses that have already been cut to the bone, or pursuing opportunities that require resources or connections they take for granted. Their advice is not malicious, but it is often irrelevant, delivered from a height that obscures the view from below.
There is a humility that comes from knowing how close we all are to the edge, how thin the membrane between stability and chaos can be. Those who have struggled financially carry with them an understanding that circumstances are not always within our control, that markets shift, that health fails, that systems are rigged in ways that no amount of individual virtue can overcome. They know that being alone is not always a choice but sometimes a condition imposed by geography, estrangement, or the simple mathematics of survival that forces people to prioritize their own oxygen mask first. This knowledge does not make them superior, but it does make them more cautious about casting stones.
The high horse of unearned advantage is a comfortable mount. From its back, the world appears orderly and logical, a place where outcomes align with effort and character. The fall from this horse is often sudden and brutal, and it is usually illness or accident or economic collapse that provides the push. Those who have ridden high for years often find themselves unprepared for the terrain below, shocked to discover that the rules they believed governed the world were actually just the rules that governed their world. They are forced to learn what others have known all along: that resilience is not a personality trait but a muscle built through use, that resourcefulness is born of necessity rather than virtue, that community is not a buzzword but a literal lifeline.
Before you offer your certainty to someone navigating terrain you have never walked, consider what you are actually bringing to the exchange. Are you providing a map, or are you simply describing the view from your own well-lit path? Are you acknowledging the structural barriers that shape individual lives, or are you assuming that your navigation skills are universally transferable? The person who has never been alone should be slow to judge the coping mechanisms of isolation. The person who has never struggled financially should be cautious about diagnosing the failures of those who have. Not because their experiences are invalid, but because they are incomplete.There is wisdom in recognizing the limits of our own perspective. It is not weakness to admit that we do not know what we have not lived. It is not surrender to acknowledge that luck and timing and circumstance play roles in every success story, even our own. The most useful voices in any conversation about hardship are often those that speak with the authority of experience rather than the volume of confidence, that offer solidarity rather than solutions, that listen first and judge second or not at all.
So if you have never been alone, if you have never felt the particular panic of financial freefall, perhaps the most valuable thing you can offer is your silence. Not a permanent silence, but a temporary one, long enough to hear what the world sounds like from the ground. Long enough to understand that your high horse is not a vantage point from which to direct traffic, but a privilege that came with responsibilities you did not earn. The view from below is different. It is worth seeing before you speak.