Worse Off

"Stop complaining, a lot of people have it worse than you do." 

"Finish your food, there are starving children in Africa." 

"Enough whining about the condom's quality, homeless people have to use discarded candy wrappers!" 

... and so forth are some examples of admonitions one might receive when voicing one's unhappiness about a given situation. People who say stuff like these work on the principle that as someone out there is definitely worse off than you are, you should feel silly about your own trivial-seeming mosquito-bites-of-a-problem and just suck it up.

I reject this logic as a) the existence of hypothetical worse-off starving/cold/uneducated/ugly people out there in the world has no bearing on my own quality of life, b) problems that exist for different people in different realms of individual contexts are not comparable and c) feeling good about your own situation because someone else suffers more is generally considered sadism. 

Somewhere out there, children are starving to death by the minute. Knowledge about that has no affect on the way each of our lives pan out. Do they become less hungry if I finish everything on my plate? My life in no way affect theirs and theirs in no way affect mine. We essentially live in entirely different worlds and feeling better or worse about anyone else's problems when you compare them against your own is silly.

People who tell us to feel better because someone else has it worse are primarily lazy individuals who do not care enough to come up with actual consolations. They promote complacency, in that your relationship problems, for example, are tolerable as compared to some poor starving child in a ditch in a third-world communist country (and he doesn't even have the luxury of drowning his problems away in vodka as you do!), ergo, you should just sit back and relish in that thought. Would humankind as a species ever get anywhere if we managed to find satisfaction in our petty problems? Looking upwards and forwards is what gets us places. 

I don't want to trivialize anyone's suffering, and the point I'm making is that everyone has problems, and the only way to truly get perspective is to actually be there.