When Did Suffering Become a Competition?

On why we compare pain – and what it costs us

Quick note: I wrote this a year ago and hesitated to share it now because so much is happening in the world. This isn’t about minimizing real injustice or suffering – it’s about the quieter, everyday way we compare pain and withhold compassion from each other and ourselves.

Photo by Tanner Messenger on Unsplash

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The other day, I was listening to a podcast when a woman started talking about how she was struggling to keep up with everything.

Her husband had just started a new job, and since he was gone most of the day, she suddenly had to take on more of the housework. More laundry. More meal prep. More of everything.

And I waited.
Please, I thought. Please tell me you have kids.

And…nope. It was just her and her husband.

At this point, I may or may not have let out an actual laugh.

Because here’s what ran through my head:

I have a full-time job. I’m trying to build something on the side. I have three small children. My husband, as a firefighter, “disappears” for 48+ hours at a time. So I was pretty sure that if I could manage all of that, she could figure out how to keep up with a household for two people.

That was my first thought. My immediate, slightly self-satisfied reaction (which I’m not proud of).

And then, I caught myself.

Because the truth is…I think this is something we’re all quietly walking around doing – slightly judging others (or maybe you’re a perfect human and you don’t do this – and if that’s the case, I deeply admire you). But so many of us compare our struggles to everyone else’s, as if other people have no right to be suffering because they aren’t dealing with what we are.

This whole thing reminded me of one of the most common arguments in relationships: the Who’s More Exhausted? game. If you’re married…and especially if you have kids…you know the one.

“I only got four hours of sleep last night because the baby was up all night.”
“Oh yeah? Well, I was up all night running calls.”
“Okay, but I also had to wrangle a toddler and keep the house from burning down, so technically, I win.”

(This was a very common conversation in my household when the baby was tiny.)

It’s like we’re trying to prove our exhaustion is more legitimate, as if the person who is the most rundown gets…what? Some kind of award?

But we don’t just do this with exhaustion – we do it with everything. Stress. Pain. Grief. We size up other people’s experiences and decide whether they’re really struggling or if they should just toughen up.

“Oh, you think that’s hard? Let me tell you what I deal with.”

We start silently ranking suffering, assigning points, and deciding whose overwhelm is more valid.

But the thing is – stress is personal. Overwhelm is personal. Just because someone’s struggles wouldn’t phase you doesn’t mean they aren’t very real to them.

I don’t actually know that woman’s life story. Maybe she struggles with a chronic illness that leaves her completely depleted. Maybe she just lost one of her parents and is barely holding it together. Maybe her mental health is at an all-time low, and the simplest things feel like mountains right now.

Just because someone isn’t coming to us with a full list of their struggles doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

We never really know what people are carrying.

And yet, we still think we get to decide whether they deserve to be struggling.

Think about grief. If someone loses a child, that is an unfathomable loss. But what if someone else loses a pet? You might instinctively think, Okay, but it’s not a child. But what if that pet was their only companion? What if that pet was their family? Does their grief not count?

Are we supposed to have some kind of official grief ranking system? Like, “Sorry, that loss isn’t devastating enough”?

Of course not.

And yet, we do this all the time.

We hear someone struggling with something we think is “easy” and immediately disqualify it. We decide their problems don’t “count” because ours are clearly harder.

But what if we just let people feel what they feel?

What if we didn’t measure someone’s struggle against our own personal hardship scorecard?

Because the reality is, my little moment of judgment wasn’t really about that woman on the podcast…it was about me.

It was about the ridiculously high bar I set for myself. The way I push through exhaustion. The way I take on everything without falling apart. (This is a lie. I am almost always falling apart.)

And if I expect myself to handle it all, then somewhere deep down, part of me assumes everyone else should be able to, too.

But that’s ridiculous. Because we all have different capacities. Different breaking points. Different life circumstances that shape how we experience stress.

This is something I have to remind myself of all the time, because as a highly sensitive person, I feel things deeply. My nervous system processes stress in a way that might be completely different from someone else’s. What seems small to one person might feel massive to me – and the same is true the other way around.

If I know that my experience of overwhelm is unique, why would I expect someone else’s to look like mine?

So maybe, instead of rolling our eyes at someone else’s struggles, we could meet them where they are. Maybe we could accept that just because we can handle something doesn’t mean they can, or even that they should have to.

And maybe – just maybe – we could take some of that compassion and extend it to ourselves, too.

Because life is hard enough without keeping score.