“If you really wanted it, you’d find a way” privilege or wisdom?

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When people say “if you really wanted it, you’d find a way,” it is rarely wisdom.
More often, it is privilege speaking with the confidence of certainty.

The sentence assumes that desire is enough, that effort bends the world, that wanting something badly can outmuscle circumstance. It turns success into morality and failure into a personal flaw. What it erases is how uneven the ground is beneath different people’s feet. A lot of people try very hard. Not all of them succeed. We only hear the stories of those who did.

This selective hearing turns survival into a myth of merit. It tells us that the people who escaped the lives they were born into did so because they were exceptional, not because luck intervened, or someone helped, or timing aligned just enough to crack a door open. Their struggle is real—but so is the silence around those who struggled just as much and never left. There are many things in life you want more than your own existence and still have to live without. Not because you didn’t want them badly enough, but because wanting is not power. It is cruel to pretend otherwise.

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Most people do not live lives of their choosing. They live lives of endurance. They survive. They adjust. They make peace where they can. And often, they die having lived a life shaped more by necessity than desire. This isn’t failure—it’s the outcome of conditions they did not choose. Optimism is necessary, but only in tension with truth. Blind hope is as destructive as despair. Telling people everything will be fine no matter what they lose is a lie; telling them nothing will ever change is another. The balance is fragile, and most of us walk it out of instinct rather than belief. People don’t truly heal. They become used to carrying. There is a quiet grief in this realization—not loud or dramatic, but persistent. Grief for the lives we imagined. Grief for the selves we never became. Grief for those who spent their entire existence surviving and were never granted the luxury of choosing more.

And yet, knowing all this, something still resists. That is why the sentence “When death finds me, may it find me alive” makes sense to me now. Not alive in the sense of success or fulfillment or escape—but alive in the refusal to be entirely emptied by survival. Alive in awareness. Alive in honesty. Alive enough to know what was lost and still remain present.

Perhaps the most dangerous lie we tell ourselves is not that effort guarantees escape, but that those who did not escape failed to deserve more.
Entire lives are spent trying and still remain unchanged—not because of weakness, but because the world is not arranged to reward effort evenly. To acknowledge this is not to abandon meaning. It is to refuse cruelty. It is to stop pretending that suffering is constructive, that loss is noble, or that endurance is proof of virtue. To live honestly is not to insist that everything happens for a reason, but to admit that much of it does not. If meaning survives anywhere, it is not in success, but in refusing to turn survival into a moral achievement.

When death finds me, may it find me alive enough to know what was never owed, and what was unjustly denied—and unwilling to be complicit in the lie that the world was fair.