One of the most common pieces of advice I hear people give, whether to me or to someone else, is to "keep a sense of perspective." (and no, I'm not going to go into the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Total Perspective Vortex right now. If you get that reference, you're probably already smiling.) But anywho, I digress.
"Keep a sense of perspective" is generally good advice. I don't disagree with it, tbh. What I've found interesting over the years, though, is that the advice itself almost always "arrives" incomplete. It assumes something that rarely gets mentioned, and I think that omission matters. A sense of perspective requires a scale. It requires some kind of frame of reference. Without that, the phrase becomes strangely abstract.
If someone tells you, "Hey, get some perspective!", I mean ok. but what sort of perspective? Compared to who? Compared to what?
I'm being intentionally pedantic here because I think there's actually something worth examining beneath what sounds like a perfectly ordinary expression.
So, ok, when we tell someone to keep a sense of perspective, we're usually assuming they already understand the scale (or reference frame) we're referring to. A lot of the time, they probably do. But not always.
Take the broadest possible perspective imaginable. Zoom all the way out a second.
We're tiny organisms on a tiny planet orbiting an average star inside one "small" galaxy among hundreds of billions in a massive universe too big to comprehend in any meaningful way. Suddenly, every human success and every human tragedy shrink into something basically immeasurably small.
It's an incredible thought experiment, tho. I genuinely think there's value in occasionally reminding ourselves just how stupidly large the universe really is and how small we are within it. It's humbling (in the best possible way.)
But it's also not particularly useful.
If your goal is to navigate everyday human existence, that scale quickly loses its practical value. At that point, the billionaire and the homeless man are equally insignificant. The happiest person alive and the person experiencing abject suffering become equally tiny against the backdrop of cosmic time. That's fascinating philosophically, but it doesn't help you decide how to approach the problems waiting for you when you wake up in the morning.
So if perspective requires a scale, the obvious question becomes: what scale is actually useful?
Imagine your car breaks down on the side of the road in the middle of a Texas summer. It's brutally hot. The air conditioning isn't running. You're waiting for a tow truck that's going to cost money you weren't planning to spend. Every passing semi shakes the car just enough to remind you that you're standing a few feet away from traffic moving at highway speeds. It's stressful. It's frustrating. Nobody in that situation is having a good day.
Then perspective enters the conversation.
Perspective reminds you that you have a car in the first place. It reminds you that you have somewhere to live once the tow truck eventually gets you home. It reminds you that, unpleasant as it is, you probably have enough money available to pay for the tow and deal with the repair. None of those things erase the inconvenience, but they do shift the emotional landscape a little. You find yourself thinking, "Ok yeah this still sucks, but it all could absolutely be worse."
That's a useful perspective because of the scale being used. You're comparing your circumstances against humanity as a whole. Relative to roughly 8 billion people, having transportation, housing, and enough financial flexibility to absorb an unexpected repair is, objectively speaking, a fortunate position to occupy. That doesn't mean your situation is comfortable. It doesn't mean you're enjoying yourself. It simply means that more than one thing can be true at the same time. Something can genuinely be difficult while also being relatively fortunate.
Now let's move the scale again.
Instead of comparing your situation to other human beings, zoom back out again to the observable universe. Suddenly, your broken-down car doesn't matter. Neither does the person who has no car. Neither does the person who owns 20 cars. All 3 of you collapse into the same category of cosmic irrelevance. That's exactly why I don't think perspective is valuable in isolation. Perspective without a defined scale is meaningless. The usefulness comes from choosing the right frame of reference for the question you're actually trying to answer.
I think that's the part we often skip.
When people tell someone to "get some perspective," they're almost never referring to perspective itself. They're referring to a particular set of values. They're quietly importing assumptions about what matters, what should matter, what counts as privilege, what counts as hardship, and what counts as success. Those assumptions may be perfectly reasonable, but they're still assumptions. The person receiving the advice may not be measuring life with the same yardstick, if ya feel me.
That's why I think it's important to ask ourselves what we're actually trying to accomplish when we invoke perspective, especially with ourselves.
Am I trying to become more grateful? Am I trying to calm myself down? Am I trying to remind myself that my current frustration isn't permanent? Or am I simply trying to shrink an emotional reaction because it feels inconvenient? Those are very different goals, even though they all get packaged under the same phrase.
In my experience, most of the time perspective gets used during negative experiences. It's the mental exercise of reminding yourself that things could, in fact, be worse. Fair enough. That's a worthwhile exercise.
But I think perspective has another equally important job. It also reminds us that our own successes aren't universal. If life happens to be going reasonably well, if you're comfortable, if you've built something meaningful, perspective reminds you that many people haven't had those opportunities. Some are still working toward them. Others may never realistically have access to them because of circumstances they didn't choose. Recognizing that doesn't diminish your accomplishments. It simply keeps you from assuming your experience is the default experience.
Most conversations about perspective eventually arrive at one of two destinations:
1.) "It could be worse."
2.) "Be grateful."
Neither of those ideas are wrong. In fact, both are often exactly what someone needs to hear. Gratitude is a remarkably healthy thing to cultivate, and remembering that your circumstances could genuinely be worse can stop your mind from spiraling into unnecessary despair.
But I think perspective offers us something beyond those two familiar conclusions.
Sometimes perspective isn't asking us to diminish what we're feeling. Sometimes it's asking us to simply examine it more carefully.
Let's say you're going through something that feels absolutely overwhelming. Maybe it's financial stress. Maybe it's the collapse of a relationship. Maybe you've built your identity around a goal that suddenly seems impossible to reach. Whatever it is, your emotional response feels completely justified because, from where you're standing, it is.
The question isn't whether you're allowed to feel that way (you are), the question is whether what you're experiencing right now deserves to be treated as the final chapter or simply the current one.
That's a very different question.
Our minds have a remarkable ability to mistake the present for permanence. Whatever we're feeling today quietly convinces us of what we'll likely feel tomorrow. If tomorrow feels the same, we assume next month probably won't be much different either. Before long we've unintentionally projected today's emotional state into an imaginary future and started believing it's reality.
I don't think we do that because we're irrational.
I think we do it because we're human.
Pain narrows our field of view. Joy does the same thing, to be entirely honest. Strong emotions have a way of convincing us that the present moment deserves more authority than it (often) actually has. We begin making predictions based on feelings instead of evidence, and without realizing it we've confused our current emotional weather with the climate itself.
That's where perspective becomes useful again.
Not because it tells us we're wrong to feel what we're feeling, but because it reminds us that feelings, by themselves, aren't especially reliable psychics of the future.
I've found myself doing exactly this more times than I can count.
Something feels hopeless. Something feels permanent. Something feels like it's never going to improve.
And if I'm honest, when I'm in that state, I don't particularly care if someone reminds me there are people who have it worse. I already know that. I don't care if someone tells me to count my blessings. I already know I have blessings. None of that changes what I'm experiencing.
But there is another perspective that's often overlooked because it's so ordinary that we almost dismiss it without thinking: Time.
Not as some magical force. Not as some poetic abstraction.
Just, time.
It's probably one of the most powerful perspective shifters we have available to us, precisely because we have so little control over it.
You can't negotiate with it. You can't accelerate it. You can't decide that you're finished grieving, finished healing, finished learning, or finished growing simply because you'd prefer to be done.
You actually have to live through it, and that's usually frustrating.
It's frustrating because it feels passive, and humans generally don't like passive solutions to active problems. We want levers to pull. Buttons to push. We want decisions to make. We want plans, checklists, strategies, actions. We want something that feels productive.
Time doesn't always feel productive. It just keeps moving, relentlessly. But in that relentlessness there is a quiet strength.
When you're hurting, "give it time" can sound like someone shrugging their shoulders because they have nothing meaningful left to contribute. It can feel dismissive, almost like they're politely telling you to stop complaining until enough days have passed.
I don't think that's what time is doing, though. I think we've misunderstood its role. Time isn't there to replace effort, it's there to make effort possible.
Every meaningful change I've ever experienced required more than simply waiting. It required thinking differently, learning something, making decisions I wasn't excited about, having uncomfortable conversations, accepting difficult realities, changing habits, or simply refusing to quit when quitting would've been easier.
Time didn't accomplish any of those things for me. I did.
But I also can't honestly separate those efforts from the months or years they required to become real. Without that passage of time, many of those lessons would've remained intellectual ideas instead of lived experience. I may have understood them conceptually, but I hadn't yet become the person capable of acting on them consistently.
That's an important distinction.
Time didn't do the work. Neither did effort alone. The two worked together.
I think that's why I keep coming back to the idea of time whenever I think about perspective. Time doesn't just change circumstances. It changes us. It quietly changes the framework through which we evaluate those circumstances. Problems that once felt overwhelming eventually become stories we tell. Decisions that seemed impossible become obvious in hindsight. Emotional reactions that once dominated our thinking lose their grip, not because they were false, but because we've accumulated enough experience to place them somewhere, shall we say, more appropriate.
None of this is to suggest that time magically fixes everything. It doesn't. There's enough truth in the old saying that "time heals all wounds" for it to have survived as long as it has, but I think we've also abused that phrase to the point where it almost sounds insulting in many cases. It implies that all you have to do is sit around and wait, and eventually everything will somehow work itself out.
Life doesn't work that way.
Many problems require action. They require learning. They require difficult conversations, uncomfortable decisions, emotional honesty, practical effort, and sometimes accepting outcomes that fall well short of what we wanted. If someone is drowning, telling them to wait isn't wisdom. If your finances are collapsing, your relationship is failing, or your health is deteriorating, the calendar itself isn't going to rescue you.
But that's also why I don't think time should be viewed as a solution. Time it should be viewed as a collaborator.
The reason I like that word is because collaborators don't replace your effort. They contribute to it. Every worthwhile change I've ever experienced involved work on my part. I had to think differently. I had to make different decisions. I had to confront things I'd rather have avoided. I had to learn new habits, abandon old assumptions, and occasionally admit that I had simply been dead-ass wrong.
At the same time, I can't honestly separate any of those changes from the months or years it took for them to become real. Understanding something intellectually is kinda sorta very different from becoming the kind of person who naturally lives that understanding. That transformation has a rhythm that can't really be forced. Experience has to accumulate. New habits have to become familiar. Emotional reactions have to slowly reorganize themselves.
Maybe that's why I think people dismiss it too quickly. We hear "give it time" and immediately translate it into, "Do nothing."
Those are not remotely the same thing.
You can spend 6 months doing absolutely nothing and predictably end up in roughly the same place. You can also spend 6 months deliberately learning, adapting, reflecting, making mistakes, correcting them, and continuing forward. Both scenarios involve the exact same amount of time, but they don't produce the same person on the other side.
Time wasn't the deciding factor, neither was effort. It was both.
That's why I don't think time deserves to be dismissed simply because it sounds like ordinary advice. In fact, I think that's exactly why it's so easy to ignore. Some ideas become clichés not because they're false, but because they've been repeated so often that we've stopped examining what they actually mean. We hear the words and assume we've already extracted everything worth extracting from them.
Sometimes we haven't.
In my own experience, accepting time as part of the process has increased the likelihood that difficult situations eventually found some kind of resolution. Not because resolution was guaranteed. It wasn't. Sometimes things didn't work out the way I'd hoped. Sometimes they worked out better than I'd imagined. Sometimes they simply became different enough that the original problem stopped being the problem I thought it was.
That's another thing time does: It changes the questions.
The version of you asking today's questions isn't necessarily the version of you who'll be asking them 6 months from now. Your priorities shift. Your values evolve. Your understanding deepens. You don't simply arrive at different answers. Sometimes you realize you've been asking the wrong question altogether.
To me, that's one of the most useful forms of perspective there is.
Not because it tells me that my current feelings aren't real. They absolutely are. Not because it tells me someone else has it worse. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. And not because it asks me to diminish my own experiences in the name of gratitude or "cosmic insignificance."
It simply reminds me that my present understanding is incomplete.
So when I tell myself to keep a sense of perspective, I'm trying to be more specific than I used to be. I'm not trying to shrink my emotions or invalidate my frustrations. I'm trying to choose a useful frame of reference. Sometimes that's gratitude. Sometimes it's humility. Sometimes it's recognizing that I've been luckier than I realize. Sometimes it's acknowledging that something genuinely hurts and deserves to be treated seriously.
And sometimes it's simply remembering that time is still participating, whether I notice it or not, as one of the quiet collaborators that (along with authentic effort) gives me a better chance of eventually seeing things more clearly than I do today.