However, for less extreme situations I find this can be helpful. From a recent personal experience I felt that acknowledging the potentiality of being far worse, and thinking about the situations of people who actually are, it helped putting things into perspective and helped me deal with a personal "difficulty".
Or, more commonly, "You think you have it hard? I know a guy who went through XYZ."
Sometimes people need perspective when they feel times are tough, other times they just need sympathy.
Yeah that's bullshit. Some poor bastard has it worse than you. That doesn't mean your problems aren't real and you don't have to deal with them. It's good to try to keep perspective on your problems but that doesn't mean you need to just dismiss them.
* I can't find a better English word for the Afrikaans "moed" which refers to not only courage, but something a little bit bigger and more holistic than courage.
Your grandparents went through the Spanish Flu? Well, Dad, we had Covid.
Your parents went through the Great Depression? Yeah, well, we had 2008.
Your parents had World War II? You had to worry about being sent to Vietnam? Yeah, that's nice, I guess, but we had 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq.
And I'm not just mocking the youngsters. The things that happened to other people are less real to us than the things that happen to us.
The Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and World War II were objectively worse than Covid, 2008, and 9/11/Afghanistan/Iraq. Far worse, in every case. But most of us didn't live the worse things. At best, we've heard about them. The more generations removed from them we are, the less the stories seem real.
On a friendly advice, one day I did some dissos (K). I didn't expect it to do anything, but turned out that true detachment from my problems was quite the foreign feeling. Suddenly the true scale of my problems became apparent. Nobody else told me this, I myself came to conclusion about my problems that "it's kind of nothing". And it wasn't dismissive, it was actually a comforting thought because it made the problems less intimidating, something I could work on rather than feeling defeated about.
I didn't really get a dismissive tone from this article, but I think if I find the same conclusion to be helpful when it comes from within but dismissive when it comes from someone else, that's a little egotistic and counter productive.