Man here. It took me a lot of therapy and help to understand that my (or someone’s) suffering doesn’t mean less just because there are a lot of others who are suffering more.

I used to say crap like this too, if someone said ‘X group of people have this problem’. I’d be like ‘but Y has the same problem but to higher extent’. I didn’t say it out of malice, at least I don’t think so. lt was natural to think ‘how can you be complaning about X when Y has the same problem but more’. Maybe I just believed that first you address the problem with bigger statistical number, then we do the smaller one after that and so on, but I dont know. I know now, that is a shitty way to think about things.

I guess it has something to do with how I was raised, ‘your problems aren’t that great, there are people with bigger problems and in comparison your life is a luxury. So chin up and carry on’. And I lived by it and parroted the same rhetoric for a long time. I believe most people (men?) do the same not out of malice but because of this shitty view of life and the world, because how they were raised, because how people told them how their problem can be ignored because someone else has a bigger problem. and they don’t know any better. At least I didn’t for a long time.