Life & Wisdom Quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald draws a scalpel line between what happens to you and what you let it become. Trouble, in his framing, is an external weather system: it can soak you, freeze you, knock the roof off. Discouragement is internal pathology, a self-propagating condition with its own “germ,” its own logic, its own appetite. The move is classic Fitzgerald: elegant metaphor doing brutal psychological work. He refuses the comforting myth that despair is a noble, inevitable response to hardship. Instead, he treats it as something closer to infection - catchable, cultivable, preventable, and, once rooted, capable of spreading beyond the original wound.

The arthritis comparison sharpens the insult. A stiff joint is situational: you slept wrong, you overdid it, you can stretch it out. Arthritis is chronic, systemic, life-rewriting. Fitzgerald’s point isn’t that discouragement is “worse” than trouble; it’s that it’s different in kind. That difference matters because it shifts responsibility and strategy. You don’t “solve” discouragement by eliminating trouble; you treat it by addressing the mindset that keeps reproducing itself even when conditions change.

Contextually, it lands like a coded self-diagnosis from a writer who watched glamour curdle into hangover, money into obligation, talent into pressure, love into caretaking. Fitzgerald knew trouble intimately, but he’s warning about the quieter enemy: the belief that trouble has already decided the ending. The subtext is a dare to separate pain from surrender before surrender becomes permanent.