"Stress is not knowing if you'll wake up after surgery and see your baby girl again. Depression is being on the wrong side of the >10% unemployment rate."
No. Stress is seeing your best friend's brains splattered all over you in a firefight in which you lose your arms and legs. Stress is being the victim of a serial killer or rapist. Stress is spending your entire life in jail. Stress is living through the genocide in Rwanda. Stress is being waterboarded ever day at Gitmo, despite being innocent, and being locked up there without a trial for the rest of your life.
There are always people worse off than you, and compared to whom your troubles are nothing. Does that mean that what you feel is worthless? That it isn't worth mentioning? That you should "just deal with it" and be thankful you weren't a prisoner at Auschwitz instead?
I've heard this, and I've said it, and I wonder if there's an answer. Are we allowed to complain about the trivial?
I get a chuckle reading reddit.com/r/firstworldproblems, but some of those things do annoy me. I don't go around complaining about it, but it'd be a lie to say that I go without want in my privileged life.
Things that suck are always bugs, unless the suck is the feature (e.g. having to walk 20 miles to get water is lame, but being able to hike over a weekend can be fun for some people).
First world problems are still problems. It doesn't trivialize the crap that most of humanity still has to deal with, but it doesn't mean that we can't improve how we do things. And given how many small, annoying little things everyone has to deal with on a daily basis I think that we'll still be improving things for decades to come.
I'm very sorry to hear that. That must have been very traumatic.
But would even you, who's gone through such trauma, find it very difficult to name someone even less fortunate than yourself, someone who's gone through an even worse ordeal?
No. Stress is seeing your best friend's brains splattered all over you in a firefight in which you lose your arms and legs. Stress is being the victim of a serial killer or rapist. Stress is spending your entire life in jail. Stress is living through the genocide in Rwanda. Stress is being waterboarded ever day at Gitmo, despite being innocent, and being locked up there without a trial for the rest of your life.
There are always people worse off than you, and compared to whom your troubles are nothing. Does that mean that what you feel is worthless? That it isn't worth mentioning? That you should "just deal with it" and be thankful you weren't a prisoner at Auschwitz instead?