A disappointment deserves its own size without being compared to somebody else’s disaster.

Measuring your setback against a worse one is meant to bring perspective and mostly brings silence. The feeling does not shrink because someone elsewhere has it harder. It just becomes something you feel you have no right to say aloud, and disappointment pressed down that way tends to return later in a less useful form.

Let a bad thing be as bad as it is, at least for a day. Skip the sentence about people who have it worse, in your own head and when listening to someone else. Proportion usually arrives on its own.