Comparative suffering / emotional invalidation

[Groundhog_Day]

My brother is a big Sam Harris fan, and he often mentions how there are millions of people who have it so much worse and would give anything to swap places with you right now. Rather than feeling sorry for ourselves, we should be so grateful for how lucky we are compared to so many people in this world.

I personally find this makes me feel worse. I think it's because mental suffering can't be seen like physical suffering. If you had an open fracture, nobody would say to just be grateful and toughen up, because somebody else somewhere in the world has two open fractures. Hopefully, they would say "let's get you to the hospital". But for mental suffering, it stills seems like "stop feeling sorry for yourself, toughen up, so many other people have it worse than you".

 

[Forever Sleep]

Yeah, I've never found this to be helpful either. It simply just introduces guilt and shame into the mix. Plus, it feels ever so slightly sadistic- I'm going to be glad it's them suffering so badly and not me! Nah, it doesn't help me at all. It just reafirms how f*cked up this world is. I certainly have the empathy to feel sorry for that other poor sod but, I'll simply do that in addition to feeling sorry for myself! I can multi task.

The only time it would help would be if I were willing to put up a fight. In which case, I may look at other people who have overcome adversity as examples to inspire me.

My Dad doesn't do it so directly but he will say: 'We have so much to be grateful for.' The problem I find is if you resent being alive in the first place! That's a very poor foundation on which to be grateful for anything. I find myself in the situation where I am desperately navigating the lessor of the evils. I have some gratitude when I dodge the worst case scenario but overall- I simply won't be grateful for being brought into this shit show to begin with. Why would you be grateful for being entered into an incredibly dangerous competition with no reward at the end?

 

[Apathy79]

I think this is part of the allure of gore sites, horror movies, kidnapping documentaries, etc. You can safely watch them from home and realise "at least I'm not them!"

I have a fridge magnet that says "yours are the worst problems in the whole world!" Which has a similar effect because no matter what I'm worrying about, it's clearly not that, but my mind likes to make out like it is sometimes.

I think whether it's useful or invalidating depends on context. I think it's possible for it to both be useful for perspective without invalidating the suffering if used well.