According to a friend of mine, my problems aren't important. Her reasoning for this opinion isn't, as with most people, that they don't exist or that they're unwarranted. Nope, it's simply because other people have worse problems, therefore my own don't exist.

Note that this is not a simple matter of comparing the severity of problems and assigning importance accordingly. It's a total dismissal of any problem as long as someone, somewhere, has a problem that is worse.

A nice example might be, You have no right to be sad about your love-life, Dave, because my other friend has cancer.

That was an actual real-life example, by the way.

Taking this logic to its, um, logical conclusion, I realized something.

Nobody is allowed to be sad or complain. Ever.

Take any person with any problem. There's almost definitely someone out there with a worse problem, so our hypothetical first person isn't allowed to lament at all. He's a dick if he gripes about his kid dying because there's somebody else who had two kids die. And then there's somebody else who had two kids die and he has a hangnail. It goes on and on, until you get to the person with the worst problems in the world.

You might think that the poor sap with the worst problems would be the only one on Earth with free reign to feel sorry for himself. But nope, because there are other people who are dead. Even the poor sap has it better than dead people, so he can't be sad or complain either.

I, of course, disagree with this entire line of reasoning. Maybe that's because complaining and feeling sad are some of my favorite things to do, and they're what I'm best at.

I guess what I'm saying is, just because something else has a bigger problem, that doesn't mean that our own problems aren't important. They're important to us, after all.

Feel better now?