Inner Feelings

Lately, when friends tell me about some problem they’re having in their lives, they tend to add little caveats. “I could’ve been on the front lines this whole time, so it certainly could be worse!” Dan tells me after sharing that he’s exhausted from virtual teaching. Annie, who’s been on the academic job market for the better part of a year and applied to over a hundred positions, tells me the situation is “merely stressful.” She’s not yet worried about how she’s going to make rent—she just really wants a steady job. The past two years have thrown the world’s enormous problems into high relief. We are so completely aware of how bad some people have it, that we’ve developed a reflex to minimize our own issues.

It’s not a bad thing, of course, to keep matters in perspective. When I hear from someone that “things could be worse,” I understand the phrase as an attempt to resist the urge to catastrophize or exaggerate, to telegraph self-awareness, to dispel unnecessary worry. On this last front it…