There is a moment that many students know all too well: it’s 3 a.m., the glow from a laptop screen is the only light in the room, and a half-finished assignment sits untouched while a cold cup of coffee quietly admits defeat. The exhaustion is real and the stress is heavy—yet somehow, an odd sense of pride lingers in the air. A whisper that says: look at how hard I’m working, look how much I’m sacrificing, look how much I’m struggling.
We live in a culture where struggle is not just normalized, but glamorized. Burnout is praised as dedication, stress is treated as ambition, and exhaustion becomes evidence of effort—all to prove that we care enough, try enough, work enough. Somewhere along the line, suffering became a badge of honour and a warped metric for measuring value. It’s almost as if the exhaustion validates the effort more than the results ever could. But when did we collectively decide that happiness has to be earned through misery?
From childhood, we are fed the narrative that good things come after hard things:
Work before play.
Pain before gain.
Study now, live later.
These ideas were meant to teach discipline, not self-punishment, but they eventually transformed into a belief that joy only ‘counts’ if we’ve struggled first. This is why so many of us feel guilty when things are going well, why rest feels uncomfortable, and why moments of ease feel suspicious. We start wondering, If life isn’t chaotic, am I even trying? When something comes easily, we decide it must not be worth having. Effort becomes synonymous with suffering.
On campus, suffering often becomes part of the social script. Conversations turn into competitions of who slept the least, who has the most exams, and who is surviving solely on caffeine and adrenaline. When everyone around you is drowning, drowning starts to look normal. Before we know it, we’re bragging about our stress, not because we’re proud of it, but because we think it reflects our worth. It becomes a currency—a way to belong.
Layer social media on top of that, and the problem intensifies. We aestheticize burnout: crying in the library becomes a vibe, a filter—a relatable meme. We glorify the chaos and turn breakdowns into punchlines, but there’s nothing glamorous about falling apart, and it’s dangerous to convince ourselves otherwise.
For many of us, the pressure to struggle comes from fear of being judged, misunderstood, or labelled as unambitious.
If you choose rest, you must be lazy.
If you choose boundaries, you’re selfish.
If you choose balance, you must not be pushing yourself hard enough.
So, we sacrifice our wellbeing on the altar of perception. We choose the harder path, even when the easier one is available because we’ve been taught that ease equals apathy. But the truth is that choosing the path without unnecessary pain isn’t laziness, it’s wisdom. Ease is not the absence of effort, but the presence of self-respect.
So how do we stop romanticizing struggle? Here are a few quiet shifts that can change our perception of success and prevent burnout:
- . NOTICE WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT BEING BUSY OR TIRED
-
Pay attention to how often your stress becomes a story you share. Ask yourself whether you’re seeking connection or validation. Sometimes what we really want is to be understood, not admired for our misery.
- . CELEBRATE CALM SEASONS
-
Allow yourself to feel proud of peace, stability, and routine. These aren’t signs that you’re not doing enough; they’re signs that life is working the way it should be.
- . REDEFINE PRODUCTIVITY
-
Let productivity mean working in ways that you can sustain without sacrificing your wellbeing. Measure your days not only by what you achieved, but by whether you lived, connected, breathed, and felt like yourself.
- . STOP COMPARING YOUR SUFFERING TO OTHERS
-
Remember that pain is not a competition, and someone else’s chaos doesn’t make your calm any less legitimate. You don’t earn your place in the world by being the most overwhelmed person in the room.
- . LET YOURSELF TAKE THE EASY ROAD
-
Ease is not cheating. Rest is not indulgence. Give yourself permission to choose a path of efficiency and simplicity without attaching guilt to it, even if it looks different from what others expect.
- . REMEMBER THAT GROWTH CAN COME FROM JOY TOO
-
Creativity thrives in rested minds. Confidence grows in calm environments. Relationships deepen when we have the energy to nurture them. Ease is not stagnation, but fertile ground for learning and growth.
Finally, keep in mind that sometimes the most impressive thing we can do isn’t push ourselves to the brink, but choose a life that doesn’t require constant recovery.
Maybe, just maybe, life doesn’t have to be hard to be meaningful.