It was a Friday night. The kind where everyone is half-awake but too wired to sleep. My friends and I were deep in our WhatsApp group chat — a mix of memes, sighs, and mid-career angst. Someone dropped the line we all secretly feared:
“Do you ever feel like you’re going nowhere in life?”
Silence. Then the floodgates opened.
One friend complained about the endless KPIs. Another about family expectations. I typed something vague about “creative burnout” — my polite shorthand for existential dread. And then came the message that changed the tone:
“Please lah, you got it easy. You’re doing what you love.”
I stopped whatever I was doing. I think for a moment, I stopped breathing too...
Because here’s the thing — it wasn’t meant to be cruel. It was probably even meant as a compliment. But the phrase hit harder than expected. You got it easy. As if the hours, the self-doubt, the unseen effort didn’t count. As if passion somehow cancels out struggle.
I thought about that phrase long after the chat ended. And it reminded me of the iceberg theory. You know — the one everyone quotes but few really sit with. The visible tip above water represents what people see: the achievements, the confidence, the curated social media smiles. But beneath the surface lies everything else — the fear, the fatigue, the unpaid overtime, the self-questioning that no one posts about.
When someone says, “You got it easy,” they’re looking at the tip. The part above water. The part that photographs well. What they don’t see is the sheer mass below — the unseen grind that keeps that tip afloat.
The iceberg metaphor is simple but powerful: what we see is not the whole truth. And yet, society runs on snapshots. We assume ease where there is discipline. We assume luck where there is persistence. We assume smooth seas when, in fact, someone’s just learned to sail through storms quietly.
There’s another framework that helps explain this — the Johari Window. Think of it as a grid of self-awareness, divided into four parts:
The Open area – what both you and others know about you.
The Hidden area – what you know but keep private.
The Blind area – what others see but you don’t.
The Unknown area – what neither you nor others have yet discovered.
When people tell you, “You got it easy,” they’re reacting to your Open area — the visible, shared slice of your life. What they don’t account for is the Hidden area — the effort you don’t broadcast, the insecurities you carry, the sacrifices made in silence.
And that’s where empathy comes in. True empathy is the willingness to remember that there’s always more behind the curtain — that every smile might carry exhaustion, every “success story” might have cost something unseen. It’s recognising that our perception is partial, our knowledge incomplete.
The Johari Window reminds us: connection deepens when we shrink the gap between what’s seen and what’s real. That takes vulnerability, and it takes listening.
But not everyone wants to explain. Sometimes it feels pointless. There’s a fatigue that comes with having to justify your struggle. So people stay quiet. They choose stillness over storytelling, not because there’s nothing to tell, but because explaining pain to someone who’s already decided you “got it easy” feels like shouting into the wind.
That silence can look like indifference. But it’s really self-protection. And over time, this quiet creates an illusion — that some people really do have it easy. When in truth, they’ve just mastered the art of not bleeding publicly.
Empathy is the bridge between perception and truth. It doesn’t demand disclosure. It simply makes space for possibility — the possibility that we might not see the whole picture. That someone’s calm isn’t comfort, that someone’s success isn’t simplicity.
When we approach people with empathy instead of assumption, we shift from judging to understanding. We stop saying, “You got it easy,” and start asking, “How are you really holding up?”
There’s a folktale from West Sumatra about Malin Kundang, a poor fisherman’s son who left his village, became wealthy, and returned unrecognisable to his mother. When she greeted him at the shore, he denied knowing her — ashamed of her rags. She prayed in grief, and he was turned into stone by the waves.
It’s often told as a morality tale about pride. But I’ve always seen another layer. Malin’s transformation wasn’t just about arrogance — it was about the silent burden of reinvention. The need to appear unscarred, to bury the poverty that shaped him. He spent so long trying to look “easy” that he forgot who he was. And in that disconnection — that gap between seen and unseen — he was undone.
That’s the danger of perception. We start believing that people who float don’t fight currents. We tell ourselves stories about their ease because it comforts us about our own pain. But in truth, everyone’s iceberg runs deep. Some just learned to steady it better.
So the next time you catch yourself saying, “You got it easy,” pause. Ask what’s beneath the surface. Maybe the person in front of you isn’t gliding effortlessly — maybe they’re just paddling quietly, hoping no one notices how tired they really are.
And if you ever receive that phrase yourself, take a breath. You don’t owe anyone proof of your storms. Just know that ease is rarely real — it’s often earned, layered, and unseen.
Because nobody really gets it easy. We just carry it differently.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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