I am looking for a term to describe the line of thinking that goes something like “I hate my work, I am sick all the time, I am depressed, I can’t find happiness. But I should be happy. Those problems don’t matter. All my problems are so insignificant, there are little. They’re just some stupid first world problems. I have it good, I have food on the table and a loving family. There are millions of people who have real problems, people living in severe poverty, starving to death, being bombed.”

I think about this often, it came up when I was talking with someone with mental health issues and I remember him telling me that this way of thinking has a name/is a common symptom that occurs in people with a specific personality disorder, although I cannot remember what disorder he claimed it was. Also this was more than ten years ago so it might have either changed or my memory of this event changed.

  • cameron_vale@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    We have certain groups of people that you are required to acknowledge the suffering of (racial, sexual, genderal, identityal, mental etc groups).

    If you fail to acknowledge their suffering then that’s pretty much the same thing as failing to downplay your own suffering. A failure to self-martyrize. Which is a sin.

    Otoh if you DO successfully self-martyrize this way then you become a member of the secret martyrs club. Which is very popular.