My teenage brother just lost his father to cancer. But that's surely just a first-world problem.

That is a tragic event. Healthy people bounce back from trauma after a healing period. Healthy people aren't the ones in need of institutional self-awareness.

Conversely, do you have chronic income insecurity? Are you dodging bullets and bombs daily as some people do? Were you ever a victim of child slavery in a third-world nation? I suspect if you have internet access you probably have reliable shelter and don't stress over food insecurity. Those are real problems, and yet the people who live through those stressors typically aren't the ones needing mindfulness. The difference is a matter of perspective from perseverance. The lack of perseverance in normal childhood development is certainly a first-world problem.

Yes, I was forced to leave my home and sleep on friend's houses multiple times during my childhood; once, we were forced to leave by threat of force in the evening, and spend three months living on a floor mattress in another city. For a couple of years, I often struggled to fall asleep due to fear, not just for me but also for my younger brother - my chest would compress at every loud noise. Randomly crying when alone (particularly in the shower) was common during that time.

But no, I was never dodging bullets. I lived in a Western country and the assailant used other weapons and wasn't part of a paramilitarized group, so I guess it doesn't count.

That is a dreadful experience that will empower you in ways others can never understand or appreciate. I have tried to explain living like this to my kids in the past and they just look at me like I am stupid.

No, it won't. It screwed me up in ways I still haven't fully grasped, and has long term negative consequences in my life. And I certainly wished I had been more mentally prepared to handle its impact.

Which is why is fucking bothers me that you dismiss life for kids in the developed world as an "absence of real problems". Just because we're not scavenging for food, doesn't mean we don't have real problems.

Sure, thankfully many kids won't need that knowledge until they're older, if ever. But it's not always clear who will. My family certainly didn't meet the stereotype.

> And I certainly wished I had been more mentally prepared to handle its impact.

People are never properly prepared for tragedy. That is the difference between trauma and sadness. No less, these things happen. Trauma lives in the past. When you reflect on these past experiences they can define you or become you. That is the difficult choice you must confront when dwelling on these memories. With effort you can choose to let the pain of past memories go, if willing. The acceptance of such choices is the nature of perseverance.

You’re like the main character in Hurt Locker at the end of the movie. He has come home from deployment and is standing in a supermarket. The mundane, everyday reality of First World civilian life seems meaningless in contrast.

So he goes back for another deployment. Another deployment in a pointless and meaningless war, yet another racket that has everything to do with the interests of the powerful and nothing to do with sentimental crap like serving your country. But he feels that it is meaningful.

“War is a racket”

I don't disagree with you. Seeing civilians with real struggles in a world destroyed by years of warfare that would crush the soul of the average depressed American puts your own trivial problems in a completely different perspective, especially when they are happily making the best of their situation.

This is my fourth deployment. When I go back to my comfy civilian job as the elite senior developer it is a bit depressing seeing the things people complain about at the job.

As an example consider this scenario that I went through:

Another developer was telling me I was using the wrong IDE. I needed to be using Atom because it has the fantastic extension called Atom Beautify that beautifies a whole bunch of different languages with a huge ton of options. I guess he didn't realize I am a collaborator on the project and many of the supported languages are available because of my beautifier integrated into the extension. Then when I am leaving the company for this military separation I had to hear from my boss in the exit interview that some code I wrote months ago was horrid, because the other developers only know how to read OOP code (even though I provided extensive documentation). Nobody bothered to talk about it or explain their distaste. How am I supposed to process that?