Usually, I am pretty critical of critics. It always seems to me that the main role of a critic is just to find something wrong, to pull things apart from the outside. Yet here I find myself doing a bit of that today.

I came across an article in Psychology Today about everyday phrase substitutions that are supposed to promote success. The idea was that by swapping out common words for more positive phrases, we can make ourselves stronger, more confident, and essentially rewire our mindset. On the surface, that sounds fine enough. But looking at the piece, I noticed a stock photo of a young Black girl standing in front of a chalkboard with the words I can, I wish, I will written on it.

It made me pause. We see this all the time in modern self-help: this subtle suggestion that if a person just stands up, puts a smile on their face, and recites upbeat slogans, whatever difficulty they are facing will simply dissolve. It places the entire burden of life, success, and well-being strictly onto individual willpower. It completely ignores that people live in different realities, face uneven playing fields, and carry very real, heavy burdens that words alone cannot fix. When we reduce human struggle to a clever phrase substitution, we aren’t helping people—we are just putting on a front.

The advice goes on to suggest that we should stop using words like try because trying implies past failure or leaves room to fall short. Instead, we are told to say I will or I want to. But I’m not so sure that’s how life actually works.

My wife and I have a bit of a running joke about this with our shared Google Calendar. Whenever an event or invitation comes up, my default response is often to click maybe. I don’t do that to be evasive or disengaged. I do it because life is genuinely unpredictable. Our culture is completely obsessed with getting guaranteed results and projecting total certainty, but the reality is that tomorrow is never fully in our hands.

When we say I’ll try, it doesn’t mean we don’t care. There is a real, sincere commitment to show up, to participate, and to give the best of ourselves. But there is also the humble recognition that conditions can change, energy can shift, and circumstances happen. Saying I will might sound decisive and bold, but it doesn’t guarantee a thing. Saying I’ll try is often simply the most honest, grounded statement a person can make about where they stand.

The same thing happens when we talk about what we lack. The article says that instead of saying I don’t have the resources, we should say I wish I had or I want to have, because the word don’t is negative. But whether you say you don’t have something or that you wish you had it, the underlying fact hasn’t changed one bit: you don’t have the resources right now. Stating that plainly isn’t a dead end. It is radical honesty. In fact, admitting the truth of our situation out loud is often the very thing that invites someone else to step forward, listen, and offer a hand.

It makes me wonder why we feel the need to constantly narrate and spin every single experience. Sometimes the most mindful, compassionate thing we can do is say nothing at all. We don’t always need an immediate comment, a positive reframe, or a silver lining when things are uncomfortable.

When we do choose to speak, our words naturally reflect our inner psychological makeup at that exact moment. They show our conditioning, our fears, our fatigue, and our hopes. Instead of society constantly telling people how they should sound, perhaps we could have a little more tolerance for how people actually express themselves. People speak the way they need to speak, from where they are standing. As listeners, our practice is to meet them there with patience and grace, rather than policing their vocabulary.

In the Buddhist tradition, the teaching of Right Speech asks simple, timeless questions: Is it true? Is it beneficial? Is it the right time? Is it spoken with kindness? It never asks us to be fake, and it never asks us to pretend that things are wonderful when they are hard.

At the end of the day, language is only a pointer. Words divide and label things so our minds can work with them, but no collection of letters can capture the full, living truth of our internal experience. Our description of a flower is never the living flower itself. Getting to know ourselves means having the courage to look directly at what is inside us—uncertainty, pain, hope, and all—without feeling the need to wrap it up in a neat, positive phrase just to keep up appearances.