Are Your Problems Really The Worst?

We've all read interviews with celebrities, or maybe even friends' blogs, in which they go on and on about how great their lives are, and we wonder what horrible shit we must have done in a past life to be dealt the hand we've got now. Bills, relationships, family, jobs ... everything just sucks. Meanwhile, everyone else in the world is running around with their sex and money and interesting hobbies. Sure, those people might have some minor inconveniences from time to time, but not like you.

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"My hands are so full of prostitute I can't put my winnings away."

Studies have found that our pain, our unhappiness, the things that bother us, etc., we perceive as much, much worse than anything that others go through. We also assume that our lives are worse and that we are unhappier than those around us.

Part of this self-pity is due to the fact that it's a social norm for everyone to project only the good things about their lives. As the author of the study pointed out, just look at people's Facebook photo albums -- it's all parties, vacations, the new puppy, the new girlfriend, the new TV, the gang laughing at a bar. Nobody posts photos of themselves straining on the toilet and screaming that their colon is full of burning rocks. And your photos are probably just as carefree as theirs.

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This life-affirming event makes your internal existential horror much less visible.

The difference is that you know there's frustrating bullshit going on in between those snapshots and that, in a way, your photo album is a lie. But you assume that everyone else's galleries of awesome are perfectly accurate cross-sections of what are clearly charmed lives. It never occurs to us that we're all doing the same thing -- building a pretty fence around a yard full of dog turds.

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"That dead horse was on MY side of the fence, Carl. I want it back."

And this also makes sense when you compare it with the study about generosity from earlier, where people basically painted themselves as heroes. If our suffering is worse than other people's, then damn it, we're downright heroic just for enduring it.

So, for instance, you know other people suffer from headaches, but that thing you have right now is a HEADACHE. Your brain has been replaced by a pulsating wad of twisted nails. And sure, maybe you mocked Steve for slowing down at work last week because of his headache, but that's only because there's no way his felt like this. Or else he'd have been reacting way more than he was. Why, this is a headache that would fucking kill a normal man! And yet, you soldier on!

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You're a lazy bastard, Steve.