My problem is that people keep trivializing my problems as "first world problems" simply because we live in an incredibly evil world where many people have ridiculously , absurdly horrible problems.
The world is evil to me but a 1000x more evil to someone else. It's still evil to me as well.
The world is & has always been a dreary place. People are horrible to each other, natural disasters happen on a regular basis, etc. The thing that makes a difference is your attitude about it. You can sit there & watch the news and get horrifically depressed, or you can choose to focus on the positive things in life. Dealing with serious issues with humor (#firstworldproblems) is one way of putting a better spin on it so you don't get mired in darkness. That doesn't necessarily mean putting ourselves on a pedestal & degrading people in lower social classes or situations than we have, but one thing I learned (from these forums, actually) is just because someone else has it worse than you do, doesn't make your problem invalid. For example, you can get hit with a few serious medical bills & go from middle class to being homeless, but still have access to shelters, soup kitchens, and free government-issued cell phones, which is a million times better of a situation than the lowest castes in India who have to publicly bathe in rivers with animal & human corpses in it...but that doesn't mean it's still not a problem for the person who is now homeless. There's actually a word or phrase for that specific type of comparison which I don't recall; all I remember is that it's some type of moral equivalence fallacy.
Yes, to some extent, smaller problems are being trivialized in relation to larger problems, but it's not done with malicious intent out of spite or anything. It's more that we recognize our position in the world, see that we have problems, but are also able to laugh about it because hey, it's not that bad. I'd even go as far as saying most of the problems in the world are man-made. For example, if more governments mandated & enforced building codes, then when things like earthquakes happen, entire cities wouldn't collapse. One crazy thing I learned a couple years ago is that we produce enough food annually to feed 10 billion people & we have only have 7 billion right now, but because our distribution network stinks (i.e. due to dictators like Kim Jong-un), people starve to death all the time. The number of people who die from preventable diseases & situations such as starvation, dying of thirst, diarrhea (kills over 2 million people per year, no joke), and stuff we have vaccines & antibiotics for is absolutely ridiculous. But then again, we make fun of ourselves all the time too...we smoke & then say "these things will kill me someday". We over-eat & eat junk food and say "I hope I don't die of a heart attack!". We trivialize our own problems because humor is a good coping method for things that aren't cheery.
So, yes, we are trivializing important problems...but not with ill intent. And it's entirely possible to swing a little too much towards the "taking things too seriously" stance. For example, there's a popular recipe floating around the web right now called "slow-cooker crack chicken" because it's an addicting recipe. Someone wrote a big essay in the comments last week about how offended they were that the word "crack" was in the name, how crack destroys lives & tears families apart & is a very serious addiction...well, they're not
wrong, but the intent of the title wasn't to downplay the very real crack epidemic, but to express how good the recipe was. The key thing is to lighten up & let things go and take things in good humor instead of being offended all the time, although it's a big trend online to get offended by every little thing that people get exposed to. To each their own, but people are going to have an unhappy life if they're determined not to let things go & to get their feelings hurt by things that weren't written or spoken with bad intent. By the way, here's the chicken crack recipe:
http://cookiesandcups.com/slow-cooker-crack-chicken/