Yeah, but the dress rehearsal is precisely the one where you're doing your damnedest to rock it like there's a paying audience.

Yeah. It's later in the run where people start to coast. "Life isn't a show late in the run where closing has been announced and half these ass-holes are too busy worrying about their next gig and are phoning this shit in" just doesn't roll off the tongue though.

"Life isn't a show late in the run where closing has been announced and half these ass-holes are too busy worrying about their next gig and are phoning this shit in" just doesn't roll off the tongue though.

There's also "Life isn't that rehearsal a few days before you have to be off book but the blocking is just about done and the costume designer was supposed to be by to measure everyone but couldn't make it so you're all just drinking coffee and faffing around seeing who can turn their half-remembered lines into the most gleefully moronic single entendre theatre," but that's even windier.

Does kind of sound like my life, though.

Is that an American thing, or do I speak funny inside my head?

It's an Australian thing too. Beyond that, I feel unqualified to comment on the quality of your cranial acoustics.

Doesn't it mainly just imply that there isn't an afterlife? It's not that the dress rehearsal isn't important, it's that there isn't one. There's only the (metaphorical) performance. (Which is presumably one-night-only, though I suppose if you believe in infinite reincarnation it could be read differently.)

Yeah, I've only ever taken it as "you don't get a second chance to do things, so do them now!"

So, does anyone else have some random platitude that totally rubs them the wrong way because the more you think about it the more totally wrong it seems?

"Everything happens for a reason."

"Everything happens for a reason."

Ooh, I hate that one.

I HATE that one Zen. Along with "It's all for the best."

Doesn't it mainly just imply that there isn't an afterlife? It's not that the dress rehearsal isn't important, it's that there isn't one.

Although, oddly, when I Googled the phrase it came up on a metric shitload of Christian inspirational websites. (Which I guess kinda makes sense -- even if you believe in an afterlife, the one thing most faiths say about it is that it's not much like this one, so every day you live here in this life in this world could still be your last chance ever to do this exact whatever-it-is.)

I still don't like it; what's the point in saying that life is not a dress rehearsal so treat every moment like it's hugely important, when importance and getting it all right are the whole point of a dress rehearsal? I can't even come up with a similarly not-pungent non-contrasting contrast metaphor to emphasize its not-pungency, but it just feels like a sad wet wad of tissue paper. I prefer symbolic language that gets tougher and thinkier the more you worry at it.

I googled "annoying platitudes" and found "It's always darkest before the dawn." But do people actually say that? I mean, to someone who's going through a difficult time?