One of my personal pet peeves is when people talk about how much harder they have it than everyone else – I’m talking about the people who compare their problems to everyone else’s thinking that theirs are worse.
I’m sure everyone has encountered this type of attitude from someone in their lives before. It’s those situations when you decide to talk about something that’s bothering you and you are almost instantly interrupted by the person you’re trying to talk with by a story and explanation about why their problems are worse.
I’ve had people tell me how they wish they had my life, or wish they could have my problems. I know they mean well in their own way, but it always struck me as belittling.
How can you know what any one else’s life is like? How do you know if someone has it easier? You don’t. We don’t know what anyone is going through. We may know of what they are going through because they have told us, be we can never know what it is like for them. We don’t know exactly how they feel, what they are thinking or how they are processing it all. Even if we go through the same exact situation as someone else, we still don’t know how they felt going through it, we only know how it felt for us. We are all different, we process things differently, we are impacted differently by situations and we express how we are feeling differently. With each person varying so drastically with their expression and managing of emotions, we have no way of being able to truly grasp and understand their experience. We will never be able to know what it is like to be someone else, we will never know what their life is like or how their experiences in life affect them. Despite this fact, I still witness so many people invalidating other people's emotions and problems. I still see so many people telling other people that their problems aren’t really problems, that they are lucky their problems aren’t worse. How does anyone have any right or grounds to even say that?
If you ever feel the urge to tell someone their problems don’t matter, do everyone a favor and don’t. Even if they are going through something that seems so minuscule in the grand scheme of things, hold back the urge to tell them how much harder they could have it, or how much harder you have it. What seems minuscule and unimportant to you, could seem like and feel like the end of the world to them. So instead of telling them their problem isn’t really a problem, listen, just listen. No one ever seems to want to listen; everyone wants to talk and tell everyone how much harder they have it. When you listen to someone, you might be able to understand them more, understand where they are coming from and you might realize that even though their problem doesn’t seem like a big deal to you, it is really affecting them. You might realize everyone in the world is working out or handling something, it might give you more empathy for people and their experiences. So, stop telling people their problems aren’t real problems.
