NdukuOutLoud

On Pain, Gratitude and Empathy.

We’ve all heard it. Probably even said it, hoping to pull someone out of a dark place : “There are other people in worse situations.”

It’s intended to be a lifeline. A gentle nudge toward gratitude, or a way to help us see that – relative to the world at large – our problems aren’t that big. I know that when people say it they truly want to make us feel better.

But I think it fails in a couple of ways.

It feels like we’re creating a hierarchy of pain. Like creating a scoreboard for pain. We are assuming that we can measure the severity of a situation from the outside. But we have no right to decide who is “worse off.” We are all experiencing life through entirely different lenses, at different stages, and with different internal resources.

To suggest that someone should be grateful because their struggle doesn’t meet a certain “threshold” of tragedy is to invalidate their human experience. It forces a competition that shouldn’t exist.

It creates an illusion of the “Better Life”

There is a subtle, almost dangerous arrogance in this phrase. It assumes that because we are currently doing “okay,” we have somehow earned that state or that we are inherently doing better than those in pain. But life is volatile. The tables can flip in a blink of an eye. We are all just one phase away from a completely different reality.

When we tell someone ,”look at how much worse they have it,” we are essentially saying that their pain is illegitimate. We are not helping to practice gratitude; we are teaching and helping them repress their own reality to avoid appearing ungrateful.

Another reason why it irks me is I believe everyone is doing their best with the tools they have, in whatever phase of life they find themselves. We don’t need to be reminded of the world’s tragedies to be grateful for our lives ; we just need to be seen. And when we are going through a difficult time, we really do not need perspective. We need presence

True comfort doesn’t require a comparison to someone else’s struggle. It requires presence. It requires being able to support without needing to adjust the scale of that pain.

Gratitude should not be competition. And neither should pain.

We should be grateful. And we should also be allowed to be human.