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.
It sounds an awful lot like what I’ve heard people with clinical depression say, a type of self-invalidation of your own emotional state.
OP, you could be the poorest person in the world and you could still find someone who’s got it worse. Everyone has problems, but that doesn’t mean your problems shouldn’t matter to you.
I don’t know your situation, but if you hate your job, you should try looking for a new one - even if it’s the same thing you’re doing now but in a better workplace.
Those are very kind words, thank you. But the quote I gave was purely imaginative, I might have said something along these lines back then (in 2012ish I think), which resulted in the conversation mentioned above, where a close person said something like “this is actually something people with x often say, it is called y” (he was seeing a therapist back then and was constantly trying to diagnose me as a female narcissist I think).
As for now, I am doing very well, it just often comes to mind. That person left some impressions I often think about. There was also a story about a monster in a suitcase that I vaguely remember and it crosses my mind so often, I will probably also ask about that eventually.
On the other side, you can have plenty of money, friends, family, and other nominally positive indicators of success and happiness and still be abso-fucking-lutely soul-crushingly depressed. Then you start down the shitty spiral of hating yourself for not being happy which makes you even more depressed and angry at yourself.