Just remember that your anxieties are child's play compared to the anxieties of people worrying every day about paying for their place to live, food or health care. These worries are tally different.

People out there having bigger problems does not diminish your own. To me, getting my children into a good public school is a current problem which is giving me anxiety. Someone saying "that's not really a problem, at least you can afford to feed your kids" doesn't come off as helpful or ease my concerns.

Similarly, billions of poor people in developing countries would kill to swap places with the poorest American, but that doesn't mean the latter has a good life.

I once read something that resonated with me (though I can't remember where), in essence that everyone has a default level of stress and anxiety that they feel (a "stress bubble" if you will), and it does not matter so much what your particular life situation is, you tend to fill up the "bubble" with whatever is going on in your life at the time. The idea is that you feel the same amount of stress as a teenager with your social issues as you do as a successful adult with more than enough money to live comfortably.

This really impacted me because I definitely came from a poor-ish background where I lived month to month and only thought about paying rent and whatnot. I then went to community college at 29 to give myself a chance at something else and then ended up making well into 6 figures having worked up to a director of a software company (unheard of in my social circle growing up).

At the time that I read this I remember feeling just as stressed about work things and family issues as I was when I didn't have health care and could barely pay my rent. Looking back, I remembered that I would feel just the same way about friend issues as a teenager when that was my whole world - something I would now scoff at as unimportant and incidental. It helped me realize that a lot of my stress levels were "baked in" to me - but that also meant I could affect my stress levels by being aware of my bubble.

Now when I am feeling stress about my financial portfolio or my kids getting proper education during the pandemic, I make a conscious effort to compare it to the helpless feeling I had when I made no money and felt powerless and that allows me to shrink my stress bubble. I also empathize much more with my kids and when they are stressing about something that my adult self realizes is not consequential. I remember that this is just them "filling their bubble" and to them it is just as important as the things I am dealing with. It also makes me appreciate those people who have a naturally small bubble and realize that that is also often a factor in their success (e.g., though I don't know Elon Musk, I can imagine that he has a naturally small stress bubble that allows him to drive so hard for success).

This is not to criticize you in any way, on the contrary, I agree with you 100%. But it is an empowering way of looking at your life.

They're really not child's play. At least not for me.

I've been poor. Not homeless poor, but paycheque-to-paycheque, zero dollars in the bank, $1500 on some maxed out credit cards, just budgeted out the non-negotiable bills (rent, heat, credit card minimum payment) for this month and I need to find $8.47 in the sofa to break even and guess I'll hit up the food bank to feed myself again sorta poor.

I make... decent money now.

Is my life objectively better? Yes.

Does the stress of figuring out where my next meal comes from and the stress of figuring out where my meals 30 years from now and how to finance my child's education feel different? No.

Anxiety is anxiety. Just because in a global context it's not as bad doesn't mean it's not as bad to the individual.

This kind of dismissive attitude toward peoples' problems is unhelpful. Following your line of reasoning, there are people with crippling diseases in the world. People worrying about a place to live etc should remember that their problems are child's play compared to theirs. And those people should remember their problems are child's play compared to someone being targeted by genocide.

There are nearly 8 billion people in the world. You can always find someone worse off, that doesn't mean people are undeserving of empathy if they aren't the one single worse off human being. This sort of worst-off competition is dehumanizing.

That is really a terrible argument. I am sorry but I am not going to feel sorry about you just because you are stressed about which crazy expensive private school your kids should go to. It is not really a worst-off competition it is just that at absolute level of suffering your issues are ignorable.

> it is just that at absolute level of suffering your issues are ignorable.

I'm curious, how do you go about establishing that level? Do you think it's really absolute, rather than relative to the stressors the observer feels? In reality, I think that's how most people actually operate. Something (extremely roughly) along the lines of: T >= O, where T is suffering of the target and O is suffering of the observer, results in empathy.

That gets caught up in the fact that suffering is more about perception, and is itself relative. So maybe we have to say both are level of suffering as perceived by the observer.

Something along the lines of "if I perceive you as suffering more than I do, I can have empathy for you". For what it's worth, I think this gets at the heart of the difference between sympathy (largely pity) and empathy more generally.

If you have a reasonable level of wealth invested in a diverse range of products you really don't have much to fear from a great depression.

A brutal and unfair characteristic of recessions is that the pain is very unevenly distributed. I've lived through several severe recessions here in the Uk and myself and my family were fine because we had comfortable jobs and incomes. Our house prices didn't appreciate as much and our wages were stagnant for a while, but we were fine. The pain falls on people who lose their incomes, lose their investments and come out of college with no jobs to chase.

I'm in no way diminishing the real hardship that these events cause, it sucks.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. There seem to be two "problems" to solve for.

1. A permanent loss of wealth. When you've got more cash, you've got more to lose. People have more to gain from robbing/suing/hacking you. Being sued when you only have a year of savings is much different than being sued the day before retirement. The various life/house/health/car/umbrella insurances should hopefully put these worries at ease. Or at least that's what I've been telling myself. Being in the earlier part of my career, I've been looking more at life and disability insurance if fate messes me up before I've built up a nest egg.

2. A temporary loss of wealth (Plan for a rainy day. Then solve for an even rainier day). This one gets me good, since there's always another increasingly more obscure edge case I didn't plan for. Like you said, these always existed before, but there were just larger problems eclipsing them. I think it's important to remember that there can always be a rainier day to plan for, and that it becomes a slippery slope into the prepper lifestyle (not a bad thing if that's your jam!). I think what's been giving me a break from this anxiety is a flexibility of lifestyle. If there's some sort of crash, I don't need to diversify to the magical ratio that happens to survive that crash - I need to keep from drawing a significant amount of money until the markets recover. Maybe this means dropping cost of living (where a more lavish lifestyle will have more fat that can be trimmed in difficult times). Or, if I'm still lucky enough to be employable at that time, I can work to ease the burden. This doesn't blanket over "world has devolved into chaos" scenario, but having stock in oil or a collection of gold bars probably wouldn't help much in those cases either. You'd have to go full prepper :)