Yes, Your Petty Problems Matter.

And yes, even in a world on fire.

The last few weeks, I have had many clients ask me some version of, “How can I come in here to talk about my privileged problems, given what is happening in the world?”

Some folks are in therapy because their lives are unlivable or unmanageable without therapeutic intervention and support. A lot of people are in therapy because their lives are much harder without therapeutic intervention and support.

They are worried about their kids, they struggle with their body image, or they can’t stop thinking about their ex. They are still emotionally wounded by a parent who grappled with addiction, they feel guilty about how much they drink, or how little they have sex.

They are preoccupied with shame, or anxiety, or both. And they show up to their appointment with a new, unthinkable secret: That they are self-absorbed and petty in the face of a world on fire.

There is always an element of this in therapy. I know from both sides of the couch that it’s hard to believe that your therapist doesn’t see you as a paycheck or a cliché. And it is the job of your therapist to show you through care and consistency that it’s an honor to be trusted with your struggles, whatever they are.

But lately, this fear of problems-too-small is showing up more than ever. There’s a genocide continuing in Gaza. Bombs rain on Tehran and Beirut. ICE agents are in our neighborhoods. Detention centers are in our cities and towns.

We are witnessing human suffering at a scale and intensity that overloads our nervous systems daily. To ignore it is callous. To look at it is unbearable. To fight it is terrifying.

So how can we still be thinking about something an ex-boyfriend said to us two years ago or our father said to us thirty years ago?

I believe this scaling of suffering is another attempt to keep us mysterious to ourselves and isolated from each other. It’s a cruel little inversion of the bootstrap narrative of hyperindividualism, this time dressed up like accountability. It’s capitalism colonizing your mental health, telling you there isn’t enough care to go around.

And then there’s the simple fear of admitting to vulnerability in a world this brutally impatient with the weak.

I have often joked that my idea of a haunted house is a white man from a well-resourced family telling me how fine he is, has always been, and will always be. In this haunted house, mental and emotional struggle have been pathologized as the sole experience of the weak, the underprivileged, the unlucky, and the other. And in my experience, Leftist men sometimes try to trick me out of my skepticism by calling it “being aware of privilege.”

But the mental health stats for this demographic, especially related to addiction, depression, and suicide, show us that the “I’m fine” approach isn’t working. And frankly, behind much of the violence of this time is a rich, white man who is “just fine.”

Privilege is a complex matrix, and no amount makes you immune to trauma or emotional suffering. And in fact, the more privilege you have, the more work you might need to do to develop resilience in the face of emotional distress—another thing therapy can help with.

I believe that part of being accountable for privilege is taking care of your mental health so that the others around you don’t have to. I also believe taking care of your mental health puts you in a position of being able to care more effectively for those who have less privilege. It enables you to fight, resist, and build during difficult times. I believe that if you can access mental health (which should be a basic human right), you have a responsibility to do it for yourself and your community.

And I would argue, no topic is actually “petty.” A client who starts talking about a preoccupation with what to wear to work ends up exploring gender identity and culture. The client who starts talking about compulsive shopping begins to excavate the traumatic intergenerational impacts of poverty.

But this isn’t just me pitching therapy; it’s me standing up for our shared human condition—which has struggle, suffering, and pettiness baked right in—as the source of our empathy.

I spent years reporting from conflict zones, refugee camps, and the front lines of power abuses around the world and in my own country. And the more I traveled, the more I learned about everything I didn’t know and would never experience, the more moved I was by how people “peopled” everywhere.

Almost no matter the circumstances, we celebrate birthdays, we fight with our partners, we worry our lives won’t be meaningful, we struggle to be selfless, we envy what we don’t have, we fear loneliness, we wonder what happens before we are born and after we die, and we fall in and out of love.

I had an informal slogan in those years that I sometimes repeated to myself when I lost my way as a journalist, “I am fascinated by all the ways we are different, and captivated by all the ways we are the same.”

That is not to flatten privilege or suggest that everyone is having the same experience. There is a vast and violent distance between the trauma some people and populations experience vs others. And that distance is fostered and maintained by oppressive systems of hierarchical power.

But if you truly hate that we live in a world where some people’s lives are considered more valuable than others, you actually have to start with caring for the silly little universe inside of you.

In the Anarcho-Socialist utopia of my dreams, people experience grief, loss, and pain. They nurse broken hearts, they ruminate over their exes, worry too much about their kids, and they fear aging. And they get to spend as much time as they want grappling with and celebrating the terrifying miracle of their own, brief lives.

Because the heart-shattering tragedy of genocide and war is not that noble, idealized symbols are being killed. It’s that people are being killed. And you know what it means to be a person—with all the magic and absurdity that implies—because you are one too.

The truth that is almost too much to bear (but that we must expand to bear) is that every single human being in Tehran, Beirut, Gaza, and “Alligator Alcatraz” are far greater than the trauma they are now experiencing. They are people who have also worried they’re not pretty. They have also loved someone who didn’t love them back. They too lost their mom before they could reconcile. They wish they could stop yelling at their kids. And they sometimes drink too much.

And I wish they were on my couch talking to me about it today. And I’m glad you are. May your commitment to your mental health, in all its pettiness, be part of your commitment to everyone around you and beyond.