If life were a video game, some people would be playing on tutorial mode with infinite lives and cheat codes, while others are stuck on nightmare difficulty with no save points and broken controllers. The crazy part? Most people don’t even realize which difficulty setting they’re on.
Understanding the different life difficulty settings can revolutionize how we view success, failure, and the advice we give others. This framework isn’t about making anyone feel guilty or victimized—it’s about recognizing reality so we can show appropriate compassion and stop giving advice that assumes everyone faces the same challenges.
Most people are unaware of their own difficulty setting, leading to misattributed success, inappropriate shame, and advice that ranges from unhelpful to actively harmful when applied across different life circumstances.
Tutorial Mode: The Cheat Code Life
Tutorial mode players start life with every possible advantage and comprehensive safety net imaginable.
They’re born into generational wealth, stable two-parent families, excellent health, guaranteed top-tier education, inherited social connections, and often family businesses or trust funds waiting for them. These are the individuals who claim they “started from the bottom” while their bottom was their parents’ country club.
Tutorial mode means consequences rarely stick or cause lasting damage. Bad grades get fixed through parental donations to schools. Legal troubles disappear through family lawyers and connections. Business failures become learning experiences funded by family money, allowing unlimited attempts without real risk. Health issues get addressed through the best medical care money can buy without any financial stress.
Success becomes almost inevitable because genuine failure isn’t actually possible within their system. The game is fundamentally rigged in their favor through accumulated generational advantages, though they often remain unaware of these structural benefits.
Tutorial mode players frequently give the worst advice precisely because they’ve never faced real consequences or genuine scarcity. They’re essentially playing life with god mode enabled, making their strategies irrelevant to people facing actual challenges and limitations.
Easy Mode: The Comfortable Path
Easy mode players have significant advantages and resources to handle life’s challenges, though they still face some genuine obstacles along the way.
They typically come from upper middle-class backgrounds with college-educated parents, experience stable childhoods, have access to good health insurance, receive quality education, benefit from family financial support during emergencies, and maintain strong social networks. While not unlimited wealth, they enjoy genuine security and abundant opportunities.
Challenges certainly exist but remain manageable because their support systems function effectively. Job loss creates stress but not immediate catastrophe. Health problems can be treated without facing bankruptcy. Educational opportunities are accessible and actively encouraged by family members who understand their value.
Easy mode players can afford to take calculated risks because failure won’t destroy their lives or their families’ stability. They can work unpaid internships, start businesses, pursue creative careers, and make career changes because family support creates reliable safety nets that cushion potential negative outcomes.
Much of the self-help and business advice industry caters to easy mode players and assumes their level of stability and resources. Their recommendations often prove impossible for people operating under higher difficulty settings.
Normal Mode: The Balanced Struggle
Normal mode represents what most people experience—a mixture of advantages and disadvantages that roughly balance out, requiring genuine effort to achieve genuine progress.
This typically includes working-class backgrounds, some degree of family stability, average health circumstances, public education, occasional financial stress, and limited but present support systems. Players face real challenges but possess some tools and resources to address them effectively.
Success requires actual sustained effort and smart decision-making over time. Mistakes have real consequences but aren’t usually life-destroying or permanent. You can improve your situation through education, hard work, and good choices, but progress takes significant time and often requires meaningful sacrifices.
Normal mode players develop a balanced understanding of both struggle and progress. They’ve faced genuine challenges but also experienced legitimate opportunities for advancement. This gives them the ability to relate somewhat to both higher and lower difficulty players, though their perspective has limitations.
The primary danger for normal mode players is assuming everyone else operates under similar conditions and judging other people’s choices and outcomes accordingly.
Hard Mode: The Uphill Battle
Hard mode means facing significant structural disadvantages that make standard advice inadequate and normal progress much more difficult to achieve.
This includes being born into poverty, single-parent households, family dysfunction, limited educational opportunities, chronic financial instability, mental health challenges, or systematic discrimination based on identity factors. Multiple challenges typically exist simultaneously but aren’t completely overwhelming.
Every achievement requires extraordinary effort and sacrifice compared to easier difficulty settings. College means taking on substantial loans while working multiple jobs. Career advancement means overcoming systemic barriers and biases. Financial stability requires constant vigilance and sacrificing things that easy mode players consider basic necessities.
Hard mode players develop exceptional resilience, resourcefulness, and problem-solving abilities through necessity. They’re often more grateful for opportunities and more acutely aware of systemic inequalities that others might not notice. They understand that hard work doesn’t automatically lead to success, but success almost always requires hard work.
The greatest frustration comes from watching easy mode players succeed with less effort while receiving social credit for superior character or work ethic. Hard mode players often feel like they’re running uphill while others coast downhill, yet somehow the downhill runners get praised for their speed.
Nightmare Mode: The Survival Challenge
Nightmare mode involves multiple major disadvantages compounding simultaneously to create scenarios where basic survival becomes a daily achievement worth celebrating.
This includes extreme poverty, family addiction or abuse, chronic illness, severe mental health conditions, homelessness, systematic discrimination, trauma, community violence, or any combination of these factors creating perfect storms of disadvantage and instability.
Normal advice doesn’t just fail for nightmare mode players—it becomes insulting and harmful. “Follow your passion” sounds absurd when following your passion means your family becomes homeless. “Invest in yourself” feels cruel when you’re choosing between medication and food. “Think positive” seems dismissive when you’re managing genuine survival threats every day.
Nightmare mode players develop supernatural resilience and crisis management skills, often at enormous psychological cost. They become experts at resource scarcity, finding hope in seemingly hopeless situations, and maintaining human dignity under dehumanizing circumstances. Their emotional intelligence and creative problem-solving abilities are often exceptional.
Success for nightmare mode players looks fundamentally different from other difficulty settings. Sometimes success means simply surviving with dignity intact, maintaining loving relationships despite chaos, or achieving basic stability that other people take for granted.
The Advice Translation Problem
One of the biggest issues with difficulty settings is that advice rarely translates effectively across different levels, creating massive misunderstandings and sometimes cruel judgment.
Easy mode advice to tutorial mode players: “You should network more effectively!” Normal mode advice to easy mode players: “You need to work harder!” Hard mode advice to normal mode players: “You must sacrifice more!” Nightmare mode advice to anyone else: “Focus on just surviving!”
When easy mode players tell hard mode players to “just be more positive,” it’s equivalent to telling someone fighting off a bear to “just relax and enjoy nature.” The advice isn’t merely unhelpful—it demonstrates that the advice-giver has no understanding of the actual challenge being faced.
Similarly, nightmare mode players sometimes give advice that sounds extreme or paranoid to people on easier settings: “Trust nobody completely,” “Save every possible penny,” “Always have multiple escape plans.” This sounds unnecessarily harsh to people who’ve never faced genuine betrayal, poverty, or physical danger.
Understanding difficulty settings helps explain why some advice resonates deeply while other advice feels insulting, impossible to implement, or completely disconnected from your lived reality.
The Difficulty Awareness Gap
Most people remain unaware of their actual difficulty setting, leading to misattributed success and inappropriate shame about their circumstances or achievements.
Easy mode players often believe they’re operating on normal mode because they faced some challenges along the way. Tutorial mode players sometimes consider themselves self-made because they experienced minor setbacks or had to exert some effort. Hard mode players might think they’re on nightmare mode because their struggles feel overwhelming from their perspective.
Recognizing your actual difficulty setting can be profoundly liberating. Easy mode players can appreciate their structural advantages without unnecessary guilt while understanding why their advice might not work for everyone. Hard mode players can take appropriate credit for their genuine achievements without minimizing the extra obstacles they’ve overcome.
The goal isn’t necessarily to change your difficulty setting—much of it lies beyond individual control. The goal is to play your actual game instead of someone else’s game, and judge your progress according to the challenges you’ve actually faced.
The Compassion Framework
Understanding difficulty settings creates a framework for showing appropriate compassion and maintaining realistic expectations for yourself and others.
We can celebrate tutorial mode players’ achievements while recognizing their structural advantages. We can support easy mode players’ struggles while acknowledging their substantial resources. We can respect normal mode players’ efforts while understanding their limitations. We can honor hard mode players’ progress while recognizing their extra obstacles. We can revere nightmare mode players’ survival while understanding their severe constraints.
The person graduating college debt-free with family support and the person graduating college while homeless have both achieved something significant—but they haven’t achieved the same thing. The person starting a business with family connections and capital and the person starting a business with no network or resources have both taken risks—but they haven’t taken the same risks.
True success isn’t just about reaching your destination—it’s about how far you traveled and what obstacles you overcame to get there. A nightmare mode player achieving basic stability deserves as much recognition as an easy mode player building a successful business.
The Difficulty Mobility Reality
Here’s what’s crucial to understand: difficulty settings aren’t permanent or fixed. Life circumstances can move you up or down the difficulty scale dramatically.
A messy divorce can drop a family from easy mode to normal mode when assets get divided and single-income households struggle with expenses that were manageable with dual incomes. Someone operating on normal mode can get pushed into nightmare mode through a perfect storm of cascading crises—health problems creating medical debt, job loss during recovery, car accident eliminating transportation, and suddenly facing homelessness.
Many homeless individuals represent the absolute pinnacle of nightmare mode difficulty, yet many probably started life on easier settings before cascading crises pushed them toward rock bottom. Understanding this prevents the comfortable assumption that difficulty settings reflect permanent character traits rather than circumstantial factors.
But there’s also hope: we can move toward easier settings through sustained effort, smart decisions, and some degree of luck. This is why people work hard, save money, and build wealth—they’re attempting to move their families toward tutorial mode conditions. They want their children to have advantages they didn’t possess. They seek financial security that protects against life’s inevitable challenges.
The goal isn’t to feel guilty about wanting easier lives for ourselves and our families—it’s to work toward better circumstances while maintaining compassion for people currently stuck on harder settings. Everyone deserves the opportunity to level up when possible.
Playing Your Game
Life difficulty settings are real, changeable, and understanding yours can transform how you view both your struggles and your achievements.
Your current difficulty setting doesn’t define your worth as a human being, but working toward easier settings for yourself and your family represents one of the most noble and practical goals you can pursue. Recognition of these realities leads to appropriate compassion for others and realistic motivation for yourself.
The next time you see someone making choices that seem obviously wrong to you, consider whether they might be playing on a different difficulty setting than you are. The next time you feel ashamed of your struggles or proud of your achievements, consider what difficulty setting you’ve been navigating.
We’re not all playing the same game, but we can all work toward easier games while supporting others who face harder challenges than we do.
Your Experience
Which difficulty setting are you currently playing on? Have you moved between settings during your life? What strategies are you using to help your family reach easier modes?
Share this article with someone who needs to understand that we’re not all facing the same challenges, but we can all work toward better circumstances while showing compassion for different starting points.