Maybe it’s just me, but whenever the second half of December arrives, the murmuring resentments about the previous year begin to bubble up. It’s been that way for some time now, though it picked up significantly in 2016 (as Sarah Condon addressed on the site) and, for obvious reasons, 2020. Still, in my everyday conversations and in my social media feeds, there’s a predictable, steady drumbeat. It was a tough year, a difficult year, a year where the shadows were felt more heavily than normal, a year where darkness seemed to close in. Or, less apocalyptically, “Gosh, this last year stank, and I’m looking forward to a fresh start.”
I want to have some sympathy for these voices, because our year-end resentments usually come from a place of sincere frustration, anger, or disappointment. Someone’s “worst year ever” may have, for them, genuinely been their worst year ever. Still, in the back of my head, a nagging voice tells me that even my worst year on record can’t compare to what humanity experienced in 536 A.D.
Historian Michael McCormick has suggested that the year 536 A.D. was the worst year in recorded history. Books have been written on the subject, but the short argument is that multiple volcano eruptions triggered an eighteen-month long drop in global temperatures that were felt across the globe, from Ireland to China to Chile. Crops failed for two growing seasons in a row, leading to mass starvation and death. The cool weather and lack of food drove rodents into human habitations, which kick-started the famed Justinian Plague, an outbreak of the same bubonic plague that would later be called The Black Death. The starvation and plague also sent the world into a period of violence and war, as the post-Roman Empire power vacuum led to an increased competition for food supplies. 536 and the decade that follows it, suggests McCormick, were as deadly a time as any in human history. No matter how you slice it, 2024 seems pretty tame by comparison.
Comparative suffering is the idea that we mitigate our own feelings of negativity with the idea that our problems “could be worse.” Sure, 2024 may have been a tough year, but let’s put 2024 in perspective with, say, the COVID years of 2020/21 or the great recession of 2008, to say nothing of the brutality and death of 536. But the comparisons don’t stop with the turning of the calendars. Comparative suffering has been, for years, the de facto tool for getting kids to eat their vegetables. “Starving children in Africa would love to eat your broccoli,” is how the stereotype goes, though there’s little evidence it actually works. “I didn’t get the promotion, but I at least still have a good job.” “I didn’t win the tournament, but I at least had a good time.” Disappointments, frustrations, and resentments are, sometimes, softened with the recognition that outcomes could have turned out worse than they did.
Whether comparative suffering is helpful, however, is another question. The internet and our wider mental health-obsessed culture hasn’t decided yet if comparative suffering is a tool to be used to help people gain perspective on their lives or a way of dismissing someone’s pain.
In college, I attended a weeklong retreat hosted by my campus ministry organization, InterVarsity. My campus staff worker, at the time in his late thirties, was there with us, and I was an enthusiastic but naive nineteen-year-old freshman. Coming out of an eager megachurch background with cutting edge music and lights, I was concerned that I wasn’t “feeling it” with the worship music at camp. (For those not in the know, “feeling it” is the sort of attuned unthinking detachment that one gets when they are lost in the music, regarded by many in megachurch circles as an unspoken sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit. In reality, it’s probably just what happens when people get caught up in good music). I pulled my staff worker aside about my concern, and his reply was eye opening. “Bryan, I get that you’re not ‘feeling it.’ It happens, and you’re going to need a Christian faith that doesn’t require ‘feeling it’ for a lifelong faith. I’ve been staffing this camp now for six weeks. I haven’t seen my family in four weeks. I haven’t slept with my wife in nine months since our baby was born. I haven’t ‘felt it’ in a long time. But God is good, even if you don’t feel it.” It was a vulnerable moment for him, and our comparative suffering was certainly a shift in my perspective.
Comparative suffering is also at the heart of the moral logic behind DEI initiatives. People have to struggle and suffer more to live a good life based on social stigmas around skin color, sex, gender, etc. It’s a moral obligation for those with “privilege” to “check” it when they have struggles in life because other people have it worse. It’s not dissimilar to the internet meme “first world problems,” where the same struggles around race and sex are applied to matters of class. A little perspective can help people work toward a just and prosperous society when the concerns of the vulnerable are held with high concern.
Comparative suffering can’t be written off as useless. People from all stripes of political and social and economic backgrounds find utility in the practice. And sometimes, people do experience a change of perspective when they are made aware of the struggles of others.
At the same time, there’s a therapeutic consensus that comparative suffering magnifies feelings of judgment, condemnation, and rejection. Famed sociologist of shame Brené Brown writes that comparative suffering is a “toxic” way of living in relationship with others. In a pandemic-themed podcast episode from 2020, Brown shared that comparative suffering was rooted in an assumption that empathy is a limited resource.
The entire myth of comparative suffering comes from the belief that empathy is finite. That empathy is like pizza. It has eight slices. So, when you practice empathy with someone or even yourself, there’s less to go around. So, if I’m kind and gentle and loving toward myself around these feelings, if I give myself permission to feel them and give myself some resources and energy of care around them, I will have less to give for the people who really need them.
At the risk of disagreeing with someone as wise as Brown, however, there is a practical scarcity factor in showing empathy to others. It requires time to listen well, it takes time to let people speak and validate what’s happening in their lives. Time, of course, is a limited commodity, one that exists in increasingly short supply in our modern age. Comparative suffering may not be helpful, but it is, admittedly, an efficient if ineffective solution to the constraints of time. It draws a helpful distinction between which of life’s struggles are worth our time and attention, and which struggles are worth leaving behind.
At face value, Brown is right. First world problems are still problems, and we rightly love our neighbors when we let them engage with us about life’s pressing issues, regardless of their size or consequence. After all, from a golden rule perspective, that’s often how we hope others would treat our problems, first world or not.
What Brown’s deeper wisdom hints at, however, is that another name for comparative suffering is weaponized gratitude. Instead of giving people the opportunity to grieve the disappointments and work through the resentments of the year past, comparative suffering is the declaration that a better and more appropriate emotion would be thankfulness or appreciation. “I’m sorry your 2024 stank, but it could be worse: be grateful you aren’t alive in 536.” Gratitude, of course, cannot be commanded, but that’s exactly what comparative suffering tries to accomplish. Another person’s gratitude requires a lot less time and attention from us than another person’s troubles.
For those of us who feel constrained to offer empathy to our coworkers, colleagues, friends, family, kids, or even ourselves, comparative suffering can be a get-out-of-jail-free card. It frees us from loving responsibility, like the purity laws of Moses being used to absolve the priests from the tasks taken on by the Good Samaritan. If the troubles are not the other person’s circumstances, but the other person’s perspective, then we feel fewer moral obligations to help them.
Again, that doesn’t mean that all uses of comparative suffering are worthless. The practice of comparative suffering is best used as a law, like all the other laws of the Bible and little-l laws of the world. A word of law alone, of course, does not engender the kind of transformative response we hope for, and only makes us aware of how we fall short. The command “Thou shalt be grateful thou dost not live in 536 AD” is good, righteous, and true, but does not actually cause a surge of gratitude to well up inside anyone, much less someone having a tough time. Comparative suffering presents accurate facts. It just doesn’t accomplish the goals it’s most often used for.
But the law and the gospel, paired together, offer a different experience. When my campus staff worker couched his comparative suffering in the form of concern for me and my future faith, I didn’t receive his suggested correction with shame or rejection. The wisdom of his vulnerable remark helped me navigate a number of trials in my young adult years, and I continue to draw on it now that I am in my own late thirties with a family of young children. Couched with concern, care, and unconditional love, comparative suffering can actually change people’s perspectives for the better. The problem is that it’s rarely used this way.
The gospel, of course, is that the limits we experience in offering empathy, vulnerability, or gratitude aren’t impediments to the love of Jesus. There’s a remarkable story where Jesus is torn between healing the sick daughter of a synagogue leader and a woman experiencing a decade of menstrual bleeding. Those bound by the scarcity mindset believed Jesus to be limited by the constraints of time and geography — he must hurry and choose who he must save before the daughter dies from her illness. Instead, Jesus takes the time to show empathy to the woman with her bleeding condition. And after this, though she had died in the interim, Jesus raises the synagogue leader’s daughter from the dead, restoring her to full health. We may feel limited in our ability to show empathy to those around us, but Jesus is not sitting on the throne of heaven rolling his eyes at our first world problems. Those first world problems are, again, still problems, the kind of problems Jesus came to save us from. And truth be told, in light of the gospel, we can pray with gratitude that things these days, though somewhat overwhelming, are mostly defined by peace and prosperity, and not war, famine, or pestilence.
Should we be glad we’re not alive in the year 536? Absolutely. Does it move the needle for my modern concerns, fears, hopes, or disappointments? Not really. But the idea that God is good outside of my circumstances, and that the larger matters of life are in his hands, and my failures and missteps don’t disqualify me from those blessings? That certainly puts a tough year in much better perspective.
