Each person’s life experiences and responses to said experiences are unique. Everything about a person’s life is colored by the privilege they experience at various ages. That privilege does not negate the impacts of trauma, though it could mean a difference in perspective.
Losing a parent, having a chronic illness, living in poverty, being the target of harassment, and suffering from various forms of assault are each their own trauma that easily compound. Remove “living in poverty” and while the situation seems “easier” the individual traumas and potentially compounded trauma remains.
Recently I have noticed a trend among Millennials (my generation) and other younger generations as well that is reminiscent of something boomers used to do to us when I was younger: delegitimization of life experience. When everyone around you is saying “shut up, everyone has it worse than you” this results in silencing. If someone has their experience silenced this results in the inability to communicate due to blocks in language processing and the inability to communicate results in conflict.
We are priming our society to be pro-conflict and anti-emotional intelligence. By perpetuating emotionally immaturity we harm those around us and potentially inflict more trauma by removing safety of expression. The angrier people are about people voicing their life experiences, no matter how different, and the more judgment passed on those with different life experiences the more closed minded our culture becomes. Instead of emotionally maturing and accepting that life can be difficult for anyone, you appear to want some child in another country to remain in a horrible situation because it provides you the fuel to chastise others. Thus, you laud the impoverished starving child while doing nothing to help them, suggesting their trauma is a virtue, using their existence as a symbol, effectively delegitimizing and dehumanizing their suffering for your selfish purpose of delegitimizing another person’s suffering. This creates conflict with your peers while failing to do anything to help those you are using as points of comparison.
Delegitimization of the lives of others has become so prevalent that I’ve witnessed Millennials and Gen Z exclude anyone with “success” from a space, to the extent of harassment until someone loses their job to “level them with the rest.” You are so convinced that no one can be happy and no one can be successful *other than you* and that you would rather sabotage and harm your peers than support them. I have witnessed this among single Millennials who target married Millennials and insist that the only marriage is a miserable unhappy one that can’t be complained about except to you in private. It seems like you want to be miserable and unhappy and bring everyone around you down.
Perhaps it is simply the American and Canadian Millennial who is like this, but it seems to stretch beyond this into other countries and generations. It is truly depressing and speaks to an anger and lack of emotional maturity that will manifest itself in the suffering of our peers and the raising of traumatized, damaged children.
Everyone’s life experiences are legitimate life experiences and the existence of someone with a different life experience does not negate that.
