What do you think about the saying, "things always work out"?

My husband soothes me with those saying’s during high stress. It does calm me and for us, it’s true.

I find expressions like that mostly well-meant, but pretty dumb. Things don’t always work out, and sometimes you just slam against many closed doors.

I find these expressions true. I always remind myself of this when times are hard.

Things might not work out but my attitude does.

Well, things do always work out…one way or another. You just may not like the end result.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

It’s a saying for troubled times that puts a positive spin on any situation. It requires some faith to believe it is true.

It is a self-soothing aphorism, designed to prevent you from collapsing into panic.
While you could say that the Holocaust “worked out” for Jewish people, because they got their own country out of it, you certainly can not make that claim for the 6 million that got murdered in the camps. Certainly did not “work out” for them, did it?

I find it true, mostly. It may not work out 100% how you would have liked it, but things will always “work out” in one way or another.

I’ll answer my own question.

Things don’t always work out. People die, people miss opportunities that never come back again, people lose their money, people get horrible illnesses that leave them never the same.

Sure, sometimes things work out or are not as bad as they seem. A situation might have silver lining or put you on a new and better path, but when I know something is bad it usually doesn’t make me feel better to hear those expressions, it makes me feel like the person saying it doesn’t understand the gravity of what’s happening.

Even things with silver linings or maybe I grew a lot from a bad experience; usually, I’d still rather the bad thing had never happened.

@ragingloli Is that what people say? The Holocaust worked out because the Jews got Israel? Do any Jewish people say that? I know Jewish people who would agree we got Israel because of sympathies around the world following the Holocaust, but mostly I think a lot of countries were happy to get rid of their Jews, and not have to take in Jewish refugees. I remember the President of Iran, Ahmadinejad, used to say something like, if the Jews got Israel because of the Holocaust (he was a Holocaust denier) then they should have been given part of Germany. People thought he was horrible, but I did see some logic in what he was saying.

This expression just means that perception is everything, and despite and ups or downs, your baseline emotional state won’t change much. You will adjust to changes in your life and carry on in much the same way that you always have.

It sounds like a soothing nothing, but it’s actually true. Regardless of how things work out, you will tend to become used to the new state of things.

I like what @Smashley said. I know you could argue that things don’t always work out, but a lot of times they do. A lot of times it’s us fighting against change that we don’t want to happen, but very rarely is there no solution at all. And sometimes it just takes having a bit more of an open mind and actually exploring different solutions, one that you may not have thought of before.
The problem is we get ourselves totally upset about the situation, and we don’t see a way out of the situation, and then it kind of becomes a self-defeating thing where we’re just convinced it’s the end of our world and so we stop looking for solutions.

I think those sayings are just to appease someone in a time of need and not really anything else. Much like the “Everything happens for a reason” it’s just to make someone feel better and don’t mean anything. Everything happens because it does and nothing more. Somethings happen because of physics simply because that is what happens when that happens. Like a flame to gasoline, boom!

Or, as my Old Pappy used to say, That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.