Negativity Is Just a Mindset
You're life may suck, but think about everyone else's lives that suck more!
If you’re not doing well, or have found yourself in a particularly grim circumstance, allow me to remind you that many other people are suffering even more than you are. This, somehow, is supposed to make you feel better.
*a doctor walks up to a terminally ill patient*
“Why are you upset over having a brain tumor? This could’ve been AIDS. When you think about it this way, your malignant brain tumor is actually not that bad! At least you have six more months to live.”
As I doom-scroll while my girlfriend mainlines Vanderpump Rules, in a classic tone-clash, I’ll arrive at a split-frame meme format that compares a first-world problem to the troops storming the beaches of Normandy. Or these memes will almost passively rationalize an issue of late-stage capitalistic entropy to soldiers braving an air raid. This type of pithy boomer truism shouldn’t require fairly granular analysis, but it is remarkable how many people are so respect-the-troops-brained that the only valid hardship they could conceive of is getting your leg blown off in ‘Nam. Guess that makes the banks foreclosing on your house a bit more palatable.
Any instance of abject human suffering could be justified when it’s compared to an infinitely worse tragedy. Imagine being a parent who just lost their child to a mass shooting, and a cop walks up and says, “Well, at least they didn’t die in the Holocaust!”
Just remember to always keep things in perspective. Your life can’t suck forever. All your problems will go away when you die.
The fallacy of relative privation is one of my favourite fallacy names. I don't know what the troops at Normandy were complaining about, it's not like they were literally on fire. Except the ones that were napalmed I guess but then it's not like they were on fire and covered in angry hornets.
Memento Mori Amsterdam.