https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb6HO62O8Fo
Remember when you were a kid, and you got cut from the basketball team? Or when the girl you had a crush on in middle school didn’t like you back? Looking back you probably see your childhood problems as trivial, but at the time you probably felt real low, perhaps even depressed.
Yet, most adults just didn’t seem to understand your problems. So what if you got cut from the basketball team? There will be tryouts again next year.
So what if some girl in middle school didn’t like you? You barely knew her, and besides you can’t experience real love until you’re older.
Is that the truth? Maybe it is, or maybe not. That’s besides the point. The most frustrating thing as a kid was feeling like other people didn’t understand what you were going through. Nobody felt the things you were feeling, and they discounted your problems as invalid, and being too insignificant to matter.
“You think you’ve got problems kid? Wait until you enter the real world…”
“Shut up! There’s starving kids in Africa!”
“You’ve still got two legs so I don’t want to hear it!”
People think that the significance of one’s problems lies solely in the objective size of them. This idea certainly makes sense, but it’s also largely inaccurate.
The problems we experience create psychological responses based on the realness we perceive them to have more so than their actual basis in reality. In other words the actual problem itself is less significant, than the importance you perceive it to have. What you think is real causes the emotions you feel.
Two guys can both be rejected by a girl, but the negative emotions their bodies will produce lies almost entirely in their perception of that event. One guy may shrug it off believing that the girl was merely having a bad night, while another is crushed because his perception of the rejection is that he as a person has no value.
We should of course use others with objectively larger problems to gain perspective on our own, but we also need to be sympathetic with people who lack perspective.
If a toddler is crying because he lost his favorite toy it’s not your place to tell him to grow up. If an elderly woman is anxious because her son missed one of her calls you don’t have the right to tell her how to feel.
Their problems may be objectively small, but because they perceive them to be significant they’re experiencing very real psychological responses. If someone perceives a problem to be real they’ll produce negative emotions, cortisol, etc, regardless of whether that problem is at all objectively significant.
Sometimes it’s beneficial to attempt to help others gain perspective on their seemingly small problems, but sometimes it’s best to simply be empathetic, and understand that what they’re going through is completely real to them.
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