Value

Often times, a common argument offered to stop people from complaining about their problems is to tell them to "be thankful for what they have and not complain too much". This can be quite irritating and annoying to a person that hasn't really found life to be all that enjoyable. Firstly, no one has asked for them to be brought into the world. As much as it seems hard to function in a world without a clear purpose or a sense of meaning, the thought of having to be 'thankful' for being alive, is hard to arise, perhaps even offensive when times are tough? How does one deal with this dilemma? Does the evaluation of life always have to be relative to other less fortunate beings in the world in order to feel better about one's situation?

Comments

There is a discussion of this issue in rabbinic Judaism, whether it is better to have been born, suffer and then die, or to never have been born at all. The answer they come to is that the latter is preferable, but since we are alive, we might as well behave well. From a secular point of view the question as to whether one ought to stay alive if one's sufferings are immense is a very real one. I suppose comparing oneself with others is one way of putting one's experience in proportion and accepting that perhaps life is not as bad as it might otherwise seem.

There is an entertaining Monty Python sketch making fun of precisely what you are getting at, where different people talk about how tough their childhoods were, with the worst off trumping everyone else. The penultimate person talks about living in a box and the last man says with apparent envy "You had a box!" . But there is a serious point here, that we often feel miserable in situations which do not really call for that reaction, and we can appreciate this by considering people who really should be miserable if they are realistic. Someone said that having lots of money does not necessarily make you happy, it just means that you can be miserable in greater comfort, and there is something to be said for realizing that. So comparing ourselves with others is by no means vacuous.

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