Please, Stop Comparing your Struggles

Social trust, the glue that holds the people together, plummets when people believe society is deeply divided. And that lack of trust feeds the political machine.

Everyone is struggling today. You can see it at the grocery store, at the gas pump, in the bills stacked on the kitchen counter. Trump’s tariffs have raised prices on nearly everything you purchase — from the cans of cat food to the dishwasher fluid to the shoes your kid needs for school. Inflation has eaten away at every paycheck. Rent is higher. Utilities are higher. Groceries are out of control. No matter where you stand on the income ladder, it feels like the rungs are snapping underneath you.

But here’s the part that’s eating us alive: instead of finding strength in shared pain, too many of us are competing over who has it worse — and that’s what they want. Social media is full of posts where someone shares their struggle: hours cut at work, having to skip meals, falling behind on bills, frustration with prices. And the immediate response isn’t empathy, it’s comparison. “My struggle is worse.” “You shouldn’t have spent money on that.” “At least you don’t have it as bad as me.”

That instinct may feel natural in the moment, but it’s not strength — it’s sabotage of your fellow American. We are missing the point — and worse, we’re helping the very people who profit from our misery.

The Hard Numbers: Everyone Is Hurting

Before we get into the psychology and politics of comparison, let’s establish the reality: Americans aren’t imagining this struggle. The working class is under attack.

• Wages vs. Inflation: Adjusted for inflation, average weekly earnings have fallen nearly 4% in recent years. That’s not just a percentage — that’s the gas you can’t afford, the groceries you cut back on, and the savings you never build.

• Daily Hardship: A Gallup survey found that 61% of Americans say price increases are causing financial hardship for their family. For 15%, it’s not just tough—it’s severe.

• Food Insecurity: In 2022, 17 million households reported trouble affording enough food, up sharply from 13.5 million just a year earlier and has only grown since.

• Housing, Childcare, Education: More than 70% of Americans say it’s gotten harder to afford buying a home, paying for college, or securing affordable childcare.

And the future only looks worse for millennials and Gen Z. A Pew Research survey in 2025 found that nearly 3 in 10 adults expect their finances to be worse a year from now. Only 20% of lower-income adults say they’re currently in good financial shape.

This isn’t an isolated crisis, it’s a shared condition. Yet instead of recognizing that shared struggle as a reason to stand together, too many of us are being trained — by habit, by culture, by politics — to fight over who is worthy of sympathy.

The Trap of Comparative Suffering

Comparative suffering is the instinct to rank pain, to measure your own hardship against someone else’s.

It sounds like this: “I can’t complain about rent, because at least I’m not homeless.” Or: “She’s talking about skipping meals? I have to skip rent entirely. She has no idea how bad it really is.”

At first glance, it seems like perspective. But what it really does is invalidate both experiences. One person is shamed into silence. The other convinces themselves their struggle is the only one worth recognizing. Nobody wins. Everybody grows more isolated.

The social comparison theory explains why: humans are constantly measuring themselves against others to gauge success, survival, and even morality. But when everyone is hurting, those comparisons don’t give perspective — they create resentment. Instead of solidarity, they breed competition: Who’s the poorest, the sickest, the most ignored.

And resentment becomes societal poison. It pushes people away from community rather than leaning on it. It teaches them to see their neighbors as rivals in misery instead of allies in resistance.

Sociologists warn us about the dangers of turning hardship into a badge of identity. When people define themselves primarily by how badly they’re hurting compared to others, they create these hierarchies of suffering. This leads to fractured groups — working poor vs. middle class strivers, rural forgotten vs. urban struggling.

Instead of the class struggle of “we are all in this together,” it becomes “we are in this, but we’re in it worse than you.”

This matters because social trust, the glue that holds the people together, plummets when people believe society is deeply divided. Research shows that perceived polarization (and the media’s complicity in it) directly lowers trust in neighborhoods, institutions, even strangers on the street.

And that lack of trust feeds the political machine. If you don’t trust your neighbor, you won’t stand beside them at a protest. You won’t vote for policies that help them because you believe they’re undeserving or wasteful. You’ll protect your own pain, convinced empathy is a luxury you can’t afford.

Relative Deprivation and Political Pain

There’s another layer here: relative deprivation. That’s the psychological gut-punch you feel when you think someone else is doing better than you — even if your absolute situation hasn’t changed.

You see it when people rail against debt relief. “Why should students get help when I had to pay mine off?” Or when a worker attacks a food stamp program, “I’m struggling to pay rent, why should they get groceries for free?”

Relative deprivation is one of the strongest predictors of political anger. It doesn’t matter if the system is hurting everyone, what matters is the perception that someone else is getting ahead while you’re not. That anger gets weaponized by politicians and billionaires who would rather see us fight each other than fight them.

This is where the comparison trap bleeds into politics.

For decades, conservative politicians have relied on the strategy of weaponizing comparison: telling one struggling group that another struggling group is to blame for their pain.

• “Welfare queens” were scapegoated in the 1980s to pit working-class white voters against poor Black mothers.

• Immigrants are blamed today for “stealing jobs” even as corporations ship those jobs overseas and slash wages at home.

• Student debt relief is painted as unfair to those who didn’t go to college, ignoring the fact that all workers benefit when the next generation isn’t shackled by debt.

Trump’s tariffs are a perfect modern example. They have raised costs on nearly everything Americans buy, but instead of taking responsibility he makes you look at your neighbor and ask why they can’t tighten their belt harder or earn more.

The result? A political climate where solidarity feels impossible. Where empathy is painted as weakness. Where we fight over crumbs instead of demanding our share of the pie.

What Comparison Steals From Us

Every time someone claps back online that “your pain isn’t enough,” we are doing the work of the people who profit from our silence. Comparison steals empathy. It steals class solidarity. It steals the chance to build a coalition around shared suffering.

Think about the labor movements that won us weekends, minimum wages, and workplace protections. Think about the civil rights coalitions that tore down Jim Crow. Think about the antiwar movements that forced governments to change course. None of those victories came from people saying, “My struggle is worse than yours, so yours doesn’t matter.” They came from people saying, “We are all hurting — and together, we’re strong enough to change it.”

Comparison divides. Empathy unites. And right now, unity is the only weapon we have left.

That’s why we need a culture of empathy, not competition. When someone shares their struggle, the answer isn’t to rank it or to diminish it, but to recognize its truth. Their pain is real, even if it doesn’t mirror your own. And when we stop pointing fingers at our neighbors and start pointing them at the policies, politicians, and corporations making life harder for us all, the picture starts to get clear.

Solidarity doesn’t have to be some grand project. It lives in small acts—sharing resources, amplifying voices, standing beside people whose struggle looks different from yours. Empathy is a muscle, and the more we use it, the stronger we get. Our stories of struggle aren’t auditions for sympathy, they are the building blocks of resistance. Empathy isn’t weakness — it’s rebellion. Solidarity isn’t charity. It’s survival.

The next time you’re at the store, staring at a receipt that somehow grew another twenty dollars higher, know this: you are not alone. The numbers prove it. Millions are cutting back, falling behind, bracing for more pain. But also know this: your pain matters, whether or not someone else has it worse. Your neighbor’s pain matters too. The fight ahead is not about who deserves sympathy—it’s about making sure none of us are left behind.

We don’t need to take away from others to make ourselves seem more worthy. We need to take back what was stolen from all of us. That’s how we win.

Evan Fields is a veteran who writes the Fourth & Democracy newsletter for Lincoln Square and News from Underground Substack.

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