Picture two people at a coffee shop. One of them starts to describe something that hurt. A layoff, maybe. A betrayal. A loss that still sits heavy. And before the sentence even lands, the other person has already done the math.

You know the math. We all do it. Well, it could be worse. People have been through harder things. Honestly, given everything you’ve got going for you, is this really such a big deal?

The verdict usually stays quiet. We are too polite to say it out loud. But it shows up in the phrases that float around as common sense. “They don’t have it that bad.” “Who hasn’t been through that.” “They actually have it better.” Same move every time. Take one person’s pain, hold it against somebody else’s, and decide how much sympathy it has earned.

I want to make a case that this move, however natural it feels, is broken at the root. Not just unkind, though it usually is. Broken in the way a bad measurement is broken. We are trying to weigh something that does not sit on a scale.

The thing we keep getting wrong

Here is my thesis, plainly, so you know where this is going. The felt weight of a person’s pain is built inside a world of meaning that belongs to that person. That world is not laid out next to everyone else’s on some shared yardstick. We can understand another person’s suffering. What we cannot do is rank it.

Let me be careful, because this is easy to misread. I am not saying every bad event is equally harmful. Famine is not the same as a rude comment, and public policy can and must distinguish a great injustice from a small one. My claim is narrower, and I think narrower is stronger. At the level where a life is actually lived, where a self is formed and wounded, the significance of an experience is tied to that person’s own frame of meaning. No outside observer, however confident, gets to override it by announcing that on some imagined universal ledger, the pain shouldn’t count for much.

The kaleidoscope

Images do work that arguments can’t, so let me give you one. Think of a kaleidoscope. You hold it up, you look through, and you see a pattern. Real symmetry, real color, genuinely beautiful. Turn the barrel, and it dissolves into another pattern, then another, an apparently endless variety. It’s tempting to say the thing shows you everything.

It doesn’t. Every pattern you will ever see is made from the same handful of colored fragments the maker dropped into the chamber. Turn it all day. You only ever get new arrangements of those same pieces, bent through those same mirrors. The variety is real. It is also bounded. The colors were decided before you ever looked.

People are like this. Each of us looks out through a chamber of fixed fragments: the experiences, the loves, the injuries, the inherited meanings that got placed in us by a history we didn’t pick. We can turn the barrel. We can notice new angles, change our minds, and see a situation freshly. But we cannot reach into someone else’s chamber and look out using their fragments instead of ours. When I try to understand your pain, I am turning my barrel toward you. If I’m attentive, I compose something out of my colors that genuinely corresponds to your experience. What I can never do is swap chambers and see the way you see. That is not a failure of effort. It is the shape of perspective itself, and it should make us humble about ranking what we cannot inhabit.

Why your own world feels so heavy

The philosopher Charles Taylor gives us the vocabulary for what the kaleidoscope is showing. In his work on “social imaginaries,” Taylor describes the unspoken background we all carry, the sense of what is normal, what counts as an insult, what even registers as harm in the first place. We don’t look at this background. We look through it. Which means two people raised in different imaginaries don’t just disagree about facts. To a real degree, they live in differently furnished worlds, where the same event carries different weight. A gesture that’s nothing in one world is a deep violation in another. And here is the part that the comparing instinct forgets: the violation is not less real because an outsider can’t feel it. It’s just being judged from outside the world that gives it meaning.

Taylor goes deeper in his bigger book, Sources of the Self. You cannot peel a person’s moral framework away and find a cleaner, more objective person underneath. Strip it away, and you don’t get clarity; you get disorientation. The framework is load-bearing. So when an experience strikes at what Taylor calls a person’s highest good, the good that orders all their others, it shakes the whole structure of who they are. An outsider who files that same event in some quiet corner of a differently arranged life cannot feel the tremor.

That’s why our own reality always has a density that other people can’t quite have for us. Not because we’re selfish, though we might be. Our experience arrives already woven into the framework that makes us, while everyone else’s reaches us as a report from a country we have to reconstruct from the outside.

Given, but never possessed

The phenomenologists, the philosophers who studied the structure of experience itself, get even more precise. Edmund Husserl pointed out something strange and true. I have direct access to my own inner life, not to yours. And yet you don’t show up as a mere object but as another center of experience. You are given to me, he said, exactly as something that can never be fully given. You are accessible precisely as the inaccessible, which is why “I know exactly how you feel” is, strictly speaking, false. The very thing that lets me meet you as another person keeps your insides from ever becoming mine. Maurice Merleau-Ponty added that perception runs through the body and is always from somewhere. I see from a location, and my location is not yours. So the demand to evaluate someone’s suffering from a neutral, view-from-nowhere vantage point is incoherent. There is no such vantage point.

Emmanuel Levinas pushed this toward ethics. The face of another person, he argued, overflows every category I try to put it in, and it makes a claim on me before I can calculate anything. The moment I respond to your pain by weighing it against a ledger, I’ve turned away from your face and swapped responsibility for measurement. Paul Ricoeur adds the last piece: we are narrative creatures who know ourselves through the story we tell, and an event means what it means by its place in that story. Pull it out of that story and you can make almost anything look small. That’s the cheap trick the comparing instinct runs, and it works only by stripping away the very thing that made the event matter.

Two losses, no common scale

Here, Isaiah Berlin earns his keep. The philosopher who spent a career on plural and conflicting values argued that genuine human goods are frequently incommensurable. That word is the key. It means they can’t all be lined up on one shared scale or boiled down to a single master value. Liberty and equality, mercy and justice are not different amounts of the same underlying stuff. (This is not relativism, Berlin insisted. There are real values; there just isn’t one ruler that measures them all.)

Suffering inherits that structure, because suffering is the loss or violation of goods, and the goods differ from person to person. The grief of a man who lost the vocation his whole identity was built around, and the grief of a woman who lost the relationship hers was built around, are not two quantities of one substance called Suffering that we could line up and rank. They are losses of different goods, each devastating within the framework that made that good supreme for that person. Ask which is objectively worse, and you may be asking a question with no answer, not because we’re missing data, but because there’s no shared scale where the answer could live. Two experiences that look wildly unequal on some imaginary universal ledger can be quite equal in the only currency that finally matters for a life: how hard each one strikes at what its bearer holds most dear.

Appreciation, not approval

Let me head off the obvious objection. If we can’t rank suffering, the worry goes, we have to approve of everything and treat every account of being wronged as beyond question. That doesn’t follow. What I’m asking for is appreciation, and appreciation is closer to comprehension than to applause. To appreciate your experience is to understand what’s driving it, to grasp the framework that gives it weight. I can fully appreciate that something is devastating inside your world while still believing, and even gently saying, that your world might grow. What I may not do is treat my failure to feel the weight as proof that the weight isn’t there.

And no, this doesn’t dissolve all moral judgment or leave us unable to say genocide is worse than a slight. The claim is bounded on purpose. At the level of law and public policy, we absolutely weigh the gravity of harms; a legal system that punished murder and rudeness identically would be a horror. The claim here lives at the personal level, the moment one human being sits across from another and presumes to grade the other’s inner life. That is where the comparing instinct does its damage, and where appreciation is the fitting response.

When empathy turns on us

It’s worth separating appreciation from empathy because we tend to blur them, and that blurring causes trouble. By empathy, I mean actually feeling what another person feels, catching their emotional state like a current. By appreciation, I mean understanding what they feel and why, anchored in steady concern for their good. These turn out to be different capacities with different consequences.

Paul Bloom made the case bluntly in his book Against Empathy. His target is the narrow, emotional kind, and his point is that it works like a spotlight. It shines on the near, the vivid, and the familiar, and goes dark on the distant and different. It amplifies the suffering we’re primed to feel and dims the rest, which is exactly the bias that fuels the ranking of pain. Social neuroscience fills in the picture. Researchers Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer suggest that what we’ve long called “compassion fatigue” is better termed “empathic distress fatigue.” What burns the helper out isn’t compassion. It’s the distress of sharing someone’s pain without a frame to hold it, which turns the helper inward, away from the very person they meant to help.

Appreciation is anchored by design. It doesn’t ask me to feel your feelings. It asks me to understand them and hold a steady commitment to your good. Because it isn’t contagion, it isn’t captured by how vivid or how similar to me you happen to be. I can appreciate the suffering of someone whose world is completely foreign to mine. Empathy tempts me to believe I’ve climbed inside your chamber and seen with your fragments, and then, when I notice I feel less than you do, to conclude that you feel too much. Appreciation never makes that claim, so it never trips into that insult.

The blind spot in “who has it worse”

Here’s where this gets uncomfortable, including for people who’d assume they’re on the right side of it. A prominent strand of contemporary thinking, especially the common reading of “equity,” has a blind spot. The blind spot is not equity itself, nor the genuine insight that where you stand shapes what you can see. That insight is true and important. The trouble starts when it quietly mutates into a scoreboard, where each person is assigned a slot in a hierarchy of privilege, and that slot determines in advance how much their suffering is allowed to count. The word “privilege” stops naming a structural fact about unearned advantage and becomes a tool for discounting a particular person’s pain. The logic goes: you belong to a group we’ve coded as advantaged, so your pain is presumed to be smaller, and we may set it aside. Nobody entered that person’s framework and found it shallow. A category got stamped on them from outside, and the verdict was read off the scoreboard.

That is a category error, and the whole argument above explains why. It treats incommensurable significances as quantities on one scale, assumes an access to another person’s interior that no one actually has, and rips the wounding event out of the story that gives it meaning. The way of thinking that started out by honoring overlooked perspectives ends up authorizing a new, confident ranking of whose pain is real. The economist Thomas Sowell warns that this pursuit of a cosmic rebalancing tends to overlook the actual people sacrificed in its name. The discounted person is exactly that, collateral damage in a contest they never entered.

There’s a hard, practical cost, too. Social psychologists have documented competitive victimhood, the way groups in conflict start fighting to prove they’ve suffered most. It is not harmless bookkeeping. It hardens biased memory, depresses forgiveness, and makes reconciliation harder. A culture that trains people to grade one another’s wounds isn’t building solidarity. It’s manufacturing the very contest that erodes it.

A deeper anchor

The secular case stands on its own, and I’ve tried to let it. But I write from a Christian worldview, and I’d rather name that openly than pretend to a neutral vantage point the whole essay has just argued doesn’t exist. For readers who share that frame, there is a stronger foundation under everything above: the doctrine of the imago Dei, that every human being is made in the image of God. “So God created mankind in his own image” (Genesis 1:27). The theologian John Kilner argues that dignity grounded in the image is not something we possess in degrees, earn through achievement, or forfeit through weakness. It is a status conferred by the Creator, equal and beyond any human power to raise or lower. As Richard Middleton notes, Genesis quietly democratized an idea its neighbors reserved for kings: the image belongs not to the eminent but to every person, which means there is no scoreboard on which some images count for more.

Here, the kaleidoscope gets its final reading. Throughout, I spoke of the maker who set each chamber’s fragments. In this frame, the maker has a name, and to look through another person’s pattern and pronounce it slight is to second-guess the workmanship of God. The biblical practice of lament shows the posture in action. A striking share of the Psalms are raw complaints brought straight to God, with no requirement that the sufferer first prove the pain is serious enough to mention. Nicholas Wolterstorff, in Lament for a Son, written after his twenty-five-year-old died in a climbing accident, refuses every consolation that would shrink the loss, and arrives at a God who does not stand at a cool distance ranking our pain, but enters into it. “God is not only the God of the sufferers,” he writes, “but the God who suffers.”

So how do we actually listen?

An argument like this is incomplete until it changes something on a Tuesday afternoon, because the comparing instinct isn’t really a theory people hold. It’s a habit people enact without noticing. The fix fits in a sentence: trade the reflex of ranking for the discipline of appreciative understanding. But a sentence isn’t a practice, so here’s what it looks like.

Suspend the scoreboard. When someone tells you what hurt, the first move is not to locate it on a hierarchy, not even silently. The question isn’t “Is this objectively serious?” It’s “What is this serious to, and why?” That small reframing returns the experience to the framework that gives it weight instead of yanking it out for grading.

Choose appreciation over empathy. You don’t have to feel what the other person feels, and the research suggests you may last longer and help better if you don’t attempt the merge. What’s asked is understanding held inside a steady concern for their good. That protects both of you, the listener from burnout and the speaker from the quiet insult of an empathy that, having failed to feel as much, decides they feel too much.

Watch your language. The comparing instinct lives in particular phrases and dies when you retire them. “They don’t have it that bad.” “Who hasn’t been through that.” Each one is a small act of ranking. Catching them as they form, and declining to finish the sentence, is a real discipline.

And keep the boundary in view. None of this dissolves the work of justice at the institutional level. Weighing structural harms and grading the inner suffering of the person across the table are different tasks, and only the first belongs to public policy.

The wound we keep reopening

I started with two people at a coffee shop, one of them quietly pricing the other’s wound and returning a verdict. The argument of this whole piece is that the verdict can’t be valid, because the operation that produces it mistakes what kind of thing suffering is. We were handed a scale that we were never able to read. The kinder move, and the truer one, is to set it down. Turn from the ledger back to the face, and receive the story as it is, without the silent adjustment we’re so quick to make.

Very few people can appreciate another person’s lived experience in the fullest sense. It’s difficult, and it cuts against a deep reflex. But it’s possible, and I’ve come to think it’s obligatory, and learning it might be one of the more important things a person, or a whole culture, can do. So the next time someone across the table starts to tell you what hurt, you’ll feel the math begin. See if you can let it go unsolved and just listen instead.

The full academic paper this article draws from, with complete citations and references, is available at the end of this blog entry.