“It will get better” becomes a more useful promise when you say what you will do next.
“Ka mu ba mirë.” It will get better. In this post, I challenge the way a comforting phrase can become a substitute for action. I use the image of one generation repeating it to the next while waiting for something else to change.
That is my criticism of a familiar attitude, not a measured account of every family or a claim that people control all their circumstances. Hope matters to the question because of what follows it: what are we going to do?
Give “it will get better” a concrete next step
If you are reassuring yourself or somebody else, try adding a concrete action. What can you arrange, repair, ask, learn or begin? Who will take responsibility for it, and when will you return to the question?
You do not have to promise an outcome you cannot guarantee. You can make a more honest commitment about the part you will do. That gives the conversation something to come back to beyond another round of reassurance.
Keep responsibility specific
Some problems require help, resources or decisions from institutions as well as individuals. Taking your own part seriously does not remove anybody else’s responsibilities. Name what is yours without pretending that the entire situation is yours to solve.
The force of the original post is in its impatience with empty words. I want that impatience to become something useful: work you can point to, a promise you can keep or a step that changes the next conversation from “one day” to “this is what we started”.