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Comment by karamanolev | Hacker News Reader

The topic of one's own hardships vs other people's hardships is frequently on my mind. My stance is that "your biggest problems are your biggest problems". For most people, there will always be someone else with bigger problems and that's not a good reason to invalidate yours or to somehow expect you to feel better about it.

  I think of them when it feels like times are tough. The pandemic. The cost of living crisis. Job loss.
  It's tough.
  But it's nothing.
  Not really.
  Not in comparison to the circumstances some people find themselves in.
  Not in comparison to the circumstances other people make it through.
  Imagine being born in a bomb shelter.
  Imagine giving birth in a bomb shelter."

As tragic as it is, yes, there's probably someone worse off than that. Does that make this tragedy any smaller? I don't think so. Especially the part "But it's nothing" is so dismissive, I can't really get behind it.

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"Your current suffering is small because somebody else suffered more."

Or, more commonly, "You think you have it hard? I know a guy who went through XYZ."

Sometimes people need perspective when they feel times are tough, other times they just need sympathy.

Well, that's true, but some people also have an attitude of "if it didn't happen to me, it didn't happen".

Your grandparents went through the Spanish Flu? Well, Dad, we had Covid.

Your parents went through the Great Depression? Yeah, well, we had 2008.

Your parents had World War II? You had to worry about being sent to Vietnam? Yeah, that's nice, I guess, but we had 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq.

And I'm not just mocking the youngsters. The things that happened to other people are less real to us than the things that happen to us.

The Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and World War II were objectively worse than Covid, 2008, and 9/11/Afghanistan/Iraq. Far worse, in every case. But most of us didn't live the worse things. At best, we've heard about them. The more generations removed from them we are, the less the stories seem real.

I disagree. It lends perspective if you know that other people made it through worse times. Especially if those other people are your family or, in this case, ancestors. It makes your own problems and challenges look smaller, which lends you courage (for lack of a better word) to tackle your own challenges.

* I can't find a better English word for the Afrikaans "moed" which refers to not only courage, but something a little bit bigger and more holistic than courage.

I agree with you. For one, job loss can be pretty dramatic, nothing to joke about or disregard.

However, for less extreme situations I find this can be helpful. From a recent personal experience I felt that acknowledging the potentiality of being far worse, and thinking about the situations of people who actually are, it helped putting things into perspective and helped me deal with a personal "difficulty".

This is anecdotal of course, but at my lowest point my problems felt all encompassing and larger than me, something I really didn't believe I could overcome.

On a friendly advice, one day I did some dissos (K). I didn't expect it to do anything, but turned out that true detachment from my problems was quite the foreign feeling. Suddenly the true scale of my problems became apparent. Nobody else told me this, I myself came to conclusion about my problems that "it's kind of nothing". And it wasn't dismissive, it was actually a comforting thought because it made the problems less intimidating, something I could work on rather than feeling defeated about.

I didn't really get a dismissive tone from this article, but I think if I find the same conclusion to be helpful when it comes from within but dismissive when it comes from someone else, that's a little egotistic and counter productive.

I completely agree. By that logic, no one but a single person is allowed to complain about their own problems. Which I kind of understand, as "shit happens, get over it and keep going" is life's mantra, whether we like it or not.

> Especially the part "But it's nothing" is so dismissive, I can't really get behind it.

Yeah that's bullshit. Some poor bastard has it worse than you. That doesn't mean your problems aren't real and you don't have to deal with them. It's good to try to keep perspective on your problems but that doesn't mean you need to just dismiss them.

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