Others I've met irl (mostly older people who think the younger generations are soft and whiny for speaking up about pain) would beg to differ. They love to engage in relative privation fallacy and compare your struggles to those faced by starving one-legged orphans in Africa. Countless times, I've been told (or overheard this 'wisdom' being imparted onto someone else) that even if I have it bad, someone else has it worse.
I don't think suffering can be objectively measured or compared on any kind of scale, due to our uniquely subjective sense of perception. What is life ruining to one person may be surmountable to someone else, and vice versa.
My foster family whom I lived with during high school were very poor. In many ways this was a difficult life. We were the only children at school with no stable internet access, I had to use free lunch vouchers and exam fee waivers at school, our meals were meticulously planned, I often went without enough to eat.. but it was a much better environment for me than living with an abusive family who were above poverty on the totem pole.
Other people might not have been able to withstand this though, and would see being in a low social class as worse than being adequately provided for, yet mistreated. This attests to the subjective nature of what it means to suffer, and how pain tolerance and an individual's limitations in life cannot truly be standardised.
However, I think our world is very blind to the fact that one bad thing usually leads to another, as the poster above me has said. Unfortunate circumstances can compound and completely throw off the trajectory of a person's life forever, resulting in a permanent disadvantage, and ostracisation from the social fabric that weaves society together.
Objectively, I know that the majority of people around me have grown up in stable two parent households. Their families provide for them, even if the relationships aren't perfect at times. They have not suffered sexual abuse, except for maybe a rare one-off instance of sexual harassment at a party or nightclub where it was swiftly dealt with before the situation escalated. They do not have chronic illnesses, nor do they have any conditions besides mild forms of autism, or ADHD which is successfully managed with medication.
No one I've ever encountered in university, the workplace, or in my everyday life, can relate to my situation at all. It does make me feel like I have it worse, because if the problems I faced were common, or able to be managed, surely I would meet anyone who shared these struggles in the real world.
Instead, I get treated like an alien specimen. No one knows how to relate to me, because fundamentally they are in a position of privledge due to the lack of trauma, and the presence of a strong support network.
All of the "support resources" and help out there are crafted by design to be for cut and dry, simple problems. For example, the framework of CBT revolving around negative thoughts or beliefs being cognitive distortions that you can wave away by labeling them as delusions. When you realize you have complex, intricate problems that don't have cookie cutter solutions, you feel completely isolated and alone.
So I would say many people here do have it worse than the average person, simply because the sort of issues many of us grapple with on a day to day basis do not respond to conventional solutions, and have troubles that have spread to many different aspects of their life, poisoning the well so to speak until everything feels hopeless. Most people, even if they have temporarily been suicidal, have not experienced an extensive crash and burn since childhood that has managed to corrupt the entire course of their life.
Being neglected and abused as a child directly impeded my education and limited the number of paths I could take. It permanently damaged my ability to socialise. It ruined my health. Not having a family, or any long term connections, like childhood friends, puts you at a significant disadvantage. When you have had one tragedy after another, crawling out of the hole becomes significantly more challenging, if not impossible. The hurt compounds. When people around you cannot relate to any of this, it's hard not to think you have it worse.
