We Are Not All in the Same Boat. We Are Just in the Same Storm.

There is an appealing simplicity to the phrase “we are all in the same boat.” It suggests shared danger, shared sacrifice, and shared responsibility. It reminds us that whatever differences existed before the crisis began, we now face the same wind and waves. The expression is intended to unite us, and sometimes it does. But like many comforting expressions, it becomes less accurate the more closely we examine it. We may be caught in the same storm, but we are not necessarily in the same boat. Some people entered the storm aboard warships. Others had yachts, fishing boats, or battered canoes. Some had experienced crews and sophisticated navigation systems. Others had one paddle, no life jacket, and a leak they were already trying to manage before the first clouds appeared.

The writer Damian Barr expressed a version of this idea during the first COVID-19 lockdown in April 2020. He was reflecting on the inequality he saw around him and the radically different ways people experienced what appeared, from a distance, to be a common crisis. Some people confronted the pandemic from comfortable homes with secure jobs and healthy savings accounts. Others lost their income, cared for sick family members, or wondered whether they could pay rent. The virus was shared. The consequences were not. Barr’s observation quickly traveled around the world because it articulated something people instinctively recognized: collective hardship is rarely distributed collectively. The storm may be common, but exposure, protection, and capacity for recovery are not.

The distinction matters because leaders frequently speak about hardship as though everyone experiences it in approximately the same way. Organizations announce that “we are all making sacrifices.” Governments tell citizens that “we are all in this together.” Military commanders remind their formations that everyone shares the mission. Corporate executives assure employees that difficult decisions affect the entire company. Those statements may be sincere, but they can also conceal enormous differences in who bears the actual burden. A senior executive foregoing a bonus and an hourly employee losing medical coverage are both making sacrifices, but they are not making the same sacrifice. A commander missing another holiday and a young soldier watching the birth of his first child over a video call are both separated from family, but the consequences are not interchangeable.

Anyone who has served in the military understands this, even if we do not always acknowledge it. A unit deploys together, but its members do not experience the deployment in the same way. The commander carries responsibility for the mission and the lives of the formation. The staff works exhausting hours trying to anticipate problems that may never occur. The infantry squad leaves the relative security of the base and encounters the enemy at close range. The aviation crew accepts a different set of risks. The intelligence analyst may spend months watching terrible events unfold through a screen while being unable to intervene directly. The mechanic works through the night so that someone else can leave the wire the following morning. Everyone is in the war, but everyone is not in the same war. You can kind of get a sense of that from a meme about the war in Afghanistan that was popular a few years back:

To be clear, I was on the left side of that meme during my four tours in Afghanistan, not on the right. I’m not trying to judge. The point is, even soldiers performing the same mission can inhabit very different boats. One may have a stable marriage, supportive parents, and enough money in the bank to absorb an emergency at home. Another may be navigating a divorce, a sick child, or a parent whose health is deteriorating. One arrives at the unit confident and well prepared. Another is struggling with self-doubt or carrying trauma from an earlier deployment. One has a leader who recognizes the strain and makes room for recovery. Another has a leader who interprets every request for help as evidence of weakness. The uniform creates an appearance of sameness that can be operationally useful, but beneath it are human beings with radically different resources, histories, and vulnerabilities.

This does not mean standards should disappear whenever circumstances become difficult. Militaries cannot function if every person is excused from every obligation because everyone has a unique burden. Businesses cannot survive if performance becomes optional whenever employees face adversity. Leadership requires setting expectations, enforcing standards, and accomplishing missions despite imperfect circumstances. But fairness is not the same thing as treating everyone identically. Treating people identically assumes they began from the same position, possess the same capabilities, and face the same obstacles. Good leaders understand that equal standards sometimes require unequal support.

The Army has long recognized this principle, although we do not always describe it that way. Leaders allocate resources according to the mission. A unit expecting contact receives different support than one operating in a secure area. A damaged vehicle receives maintenance attention before one that is fully operational. A new lieutenant receives more supervision than an experienced company commander. We do not consider these differences unfair. We consider them prudent because leadership involves understanding conditions and applying resources where they are most needed.

Yet we sometimes abandon that logic when dealing with people. We assume that because two employees hold the same position, two soldiers wear the same rank, or two families live in the same community, they possess roughly equal capacity to withstand hardship. When one struggles while another succeeds, we are tempted to attribute the difference entirely to character. One was resilient. The other was weak. One worked hard. The other failed to prepare. Sometimes those judgments contain some truth. Personal choices matter, discipline matters, and resilience matters. But character is only part of the equation. The seaworthiness of the boat matters too.

Resilience is often discussed as though it were an exclusively internal quality, something produced through grit, optimism, and determination. Those things certainly help. But resilience also has structural components. Savings create resilience. Stable housing creates resilience. Reliable child care creates resilience. Access to health care, supportive relationships, competent leadership, and confidence that asking for help will not destroy one’s career all create resilience. Telling someone to become more resilient while ignoring the conditions making that person vulnerable is the organizational equivalent of handing a sailor a motivational poster while water pours through the hull.

The same lesson applies in business. When a company encounters economic turbulence, leaders may believe the entire workforce is sharing a common experience. Revenue is falling, competition is increasing, and uncertainty is spreading. But the effects of those conditions vary considerably across the organization. Senior leaders may face pressure from investors and concern about the company’s future. Middle managers may be expected to implement decisions they did not make and cannot fully explain. Salaried employees may worry about layoffs. Hourly workers may immediately lose income when their shifts are reduced. Contractors may discover that they have no protection at all.

Leaders who fail to recognize these differences eventually lose credibility. Employees are remarkably capable of detecting when the rhetoric of shared sacrifice does not match the reality of distributed hardship. They notice when executives announce layoffs from offices that remain comfortably insulated from the consequences. Soldiers notice when unnecessary misery is imposed in the name of “shared hardship” by leaders who do not actually share it. Citizens notice when people making policy are protected from its most damaging effects. The problem is not that leaders possess greater responsibility, authority, or compensation. Hierarchies exist for reasons. The problem arises when privilege is disguised as sacrifice and those carrying the heaviest load are told that everyone’s burden is the same.

Acknowledging different boats can be uncomfortable because it complicates the moral clarity of a shared storm. If we are all in the same boat, then we can tell ourselves that everyone has an equal opportunity to endure. Success becomes evidence of virtue, while failure becomes evidence of personal deficiency. Once we recognize that the boats are different, we must confront harder questions. Who had access to safety? Who carried the greatest risk? Who made decisions, and who absorbed their consequences? Which boats were reinforced before the storm, and which were neglected? Who had a lifeboat waiting?

Those questions are sometimes interpreted as invitations to resentment, but they do not have to be. Recognizing unequal circumstances does not require condemning everyone who is fortunate. A person aboard a strong vessel is not automatically responsible for the fact that someone else is clinging to wreckage. Nor does suffering become less real merely because someone else is suffering more. The executive worried about losing a company may be experiencing genuine fear even if an employee is facing eviction. The commander’s responsibility may be crushing even if the soldier on patrol faces greater physical danger. Compassion is not a finite resource. We do not need to deny one person’s hardship to recognize another person’s greater vulnerability.

What recognition should produce is responsibility. If your boat is stronger, you may be in a position to help someone whose boat is failing. If you possess authority, resources, information, or influence, then you have options others may not. Leadership is partly the obligation to use those advantages on behalf of the people entrusted to you. That does not mean rescuing everyone from every consequence or pretending that resources are unlimited. It means looking beyond the surface appearance of shared hardship and determining where intervention can make a meaningful difference.

Sometimes the necessary intervention is material: money, equipment, personnel, time, or access to care. Sometimes it is procedural: changing a policy that imposes unnecessary hardship on people with the least ability to absorb it. Sometimes it is informational: ensuring that those affected by a decision understand what is happening and why. Sometimes it is simply human: listening before judging, acknowledging that a person is struggling, and creating enough trust for someone to admit that the boat is taking on water.

This is particularly important in organizations that celebrate toughness. Military culture prizes endurance for good reason. War is hard, the enemy is indifferent to our feelings, and missions cannot always pause while everyone becomes comfortable. But toughness can become performative when leaders confuse preventable suffering with useful preparation. There is no virtue in allowing a manageable problem to become a crisis merely to see whether someone can endure it. Leaders should develop resilient people and organizations, but resilience is strengthened through preparation, trust, competence, and recovery, not through indifference.

The storm metaphor also reminds us that circumstances change. The person aboard the strongest boat today may be the one in distress tomorrow. Careers collapse. Illness arrives. Marriages end. Markets turn. Wars begin. Institutions that appeared permanent disappear with startling speed. One of the reasons humility matters is that none of us fully controls the weather, and few of us built our boats entirely by ourselves. Family, mentors, institutions, opportunity, timing, and luck all contributed more to our seaworthiness than most of us like to admit.

That recognition should make successful people more generous, not more ashamed. It should also make struggling people less willing to interpret every setback as a verdict on their worth. Sometimes a person fails because of poor choices. Sometimes a person fails because the storm overwhelmed the vessel available to him. Usually, the truth contains elements of both. Mature judgment requires us to resist simple explanations when human lives are rarely simple.

The phrase “we are not all in the same boat” is therefore not an argument against solidarity. Properly understood, it is an argument for a more honest form of solidarity. Real unity does not require pretending that everyone’s circumstances are identical. It requires recognizing that our fates remain connected despite those differences. The ships may vary in size, condition, and capability, but they still occupy the same sea. A vessel that ignores distress calls because its own hull is secure has misunderstood both leadership and community.

In the military, the strongest units are not those in which every soldier experiences the same hardship. They are the ones in which people trust that hardship will be recognized, burdens will be distributed as fairly as the mission allows, and no one will be abandoned unnecessarily. The same is true of businesses, families, and societies. People will endure extraordinary difficulty when they believe their leaders understand what they are asking, share what can reasonably be shared, and care about the consequences for those with the least protection.

We should be cautious, then, whenever someone tells us that we are all in the same boat. Perhaps the statement is intended to inspire. Perhaps it is meant to comfort. But leadership begins with seeing conditions as they are, not as a slogan makes them appear. We are not all equally protected. We are not all equally prepared. We do not all possess the same resources, and the same wave will not produce the same damage in every life.

We are, however, still in the same storm.

That means the people in stronger boats should pay attention to those in weaker ones. It means leaders should look beyond identical treatment and pursue meaningful fairness. It means those who are temporarily secure should resist mistaking good fortune for moral superiority. It means we should judge more carefully, listen more closely, and remember how quickly the weather can change.

It’s also important to remember that boats don’t sink because of the water that surrounds them. They sink because of the water that gets in them. And it’s a lot easier for metaphorical water to get into our boats if we have leaky character.

The storm reveals the differences between our boats. Character is revealed by what we do after we notice them.

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Charles served over 27 years in the US Army, which included seven combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with various Special Operations Forces units and two stints as an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He also completed operational tours in Egypt, the Philippines, and the Republic of Korea and earned a Doctor of Business Administration from Temple University as well as a Master of Arts in International Relations from Yale University. He is the owner of The Havok Journal, and the views expressed herein are his own and do not reflect those of the US Government or any other person or entity.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.