“Why Being ‘Strong’ Is Destroying a Generation”

I learned how to be strong before I learned how to ask for help.
And by the time I realized those two things weren’t the same, I was already exhausted.
We praise strength like it’s a cure-all. Be strong. Stay strong. You’re so strong—I don’t know how you do it. We say it at funerals. We say it after breakups. We say it to children who are learning too early that crying makes adults uncomfortable.
Strength has become our favorite compliment and our most dangerous lie.
Because no one ever explains what it costs.
I grew up believing that being strong meant swallowing pain quietly. It meant not burdening others. It meant smiling through the worst moments because someone else always had it worse. Strength was silence. Strength was endurance. Strength was survival without witnesses.
So I perfected it.
When my world cracked, I didn’t scream. I didn’t collapse. I didn’t reach out. I showed up to work on time. I answered texts with “I’m good.” I posted photos where I looked fine. I carried my grief like a private weight strapped to my chest, invisible and crushing.
People admired me for it.
“You’re so strong,” they said, as if that settled everything.
But strength, the way we define it, doesn’t heal you. It just teaches you how to bleed without making a mess.
Somewhere along the line, we turned resilience into repression. We taught an entire generation that feeling deeply is a flaw and needing help is a failure. We turned coping into a performance and pain into something you manage quietly so it doesn’t inconvenience anyone else.
We don’t tell people to rest. We tell them to push through.
We don’t ask how they’re really doing. We accept “fine” and move on.
We don’t sit with discomfort. We label it weakness and scroll past it.
And the result?
Burnout that looks like ambition.
Anxiety that masquerades as productivity.
Depression hiding behind jokes, overworking, and “I’m just tired.”
We’re raising people who don’t know how to fall apart safely. People who can survive almost anything—except themselves.
I’ve watched friends disappear slowly, not in dramatic ways, but in quiet ones. They became less expressive. Less present. Less alive. They mastered the art of functioning while numb. They wore strength like armor until they forgot how to take it off.
And when they finally cracked, everyone was shocked.
“But they were so strong.”
That’s the problem.
We confuse strength with the absence of visible pain. We trust people who don’t complain. We reward those who endure silently. We miss the warning signs because we’ve trained ourselves to admire them.
Strength has become a trap.
Especially for men, who are still taught that vulnerability is a liability. Especially for women, who are expected to carry emotional labor without collapsing. Especially for young people, who are navigating a world that demands resilience without offering support.
We tell them to toughen up while the ground keeps shifting beneath their feet.
Economic pressure. Social comparison. Constant visibility. Endless crises. The message is always the same: adapt, endure, keep going.
No wonder so many feel like they’re failing at life while doing everything right.
I used to think strength meant never breaking.
Now I think it means knowing when you can’t hold yourself together alone.
Real strength looks like admitting you’re overwhelmed before you’re destroyed by it. It looks like asking for help without apologizing. It looks like resting without earning it. It looks like saying, “I’m not okay,” and letting that be enough.
But we don’t model that.
We glorify hustle and stoicism. We romanticize struggle. We clap for survival stories and ignore the cost paid in private.
We teach people how to push through pain—but not how to process it.
So it stays.
It settles in the body. It shows up as chronic stress, emotional distance, insomnia, anger that feels misplaced, sadness without a clear cause. It leaks into relationships. It shapes how we love, how we parent, how we treat ourselves.
And then we wonder why so many feel empty, disconnected, and exhausted.
This generation isn’t weak.
It’s overburdened.
It’s tired of carrying everything alone. Tired of being praised for strength when what it really needs is permission to be human.
I don’t want to be strong anymore in the way I was taught. I don’t want to be admired for how much I can endure. I want to be supported for how honestly I can live.
I want a world where we stop telling people to be strong and start asking what they need.
Where we normalize softness alongside resilience. Where breaking isn’t a failure—it’s a signal. Where healing isn’t something you do quietly in the background while life keeps demanding more.
Strength didn’t save me.
Being seen did.
And maybe that’s what this generation is really fighting for—not the right to be unbreakable, but the right to fall apart and be held instead of judged.
If we keep teaching people to survive without support, we shouldn’t be surprised when survival feels like all they’re capable of.
But if we redefine strength—if we make room for vulnerability, rest, and connection—we might finally raise a generation that doesn’t just endure life…
…but actually lives it.