I wasnt trying to say you can always find a worse situation than yours. My point was more, that being an engineer who works in a comfortable chair for a great salary, is an amazing situation, if you're not happy with it, maybe switching situations will help, but consider that maybe you need to be more aware of how good you have it and find happiness within yourself
I mean... At least those minimum wage call center workers have an income, right? They should be happy they get to work in a chair. There are literally kids starving in Africa right now.
I'm in the highest-paid job of my life, getting a free day off once a month on top of 21 days' leave and public holidays. Free health insurance, learning budget, work from home, equity, share plan. Things are very good. I couldn't want more or design a better job.
Yet the agile ceremonies, working on a team where small PR's are open over a week as people argue about names or something, isn't following someone's arbitrary style preference, which is now a dogmatic team rule in the team styleguide.md file or rules.md file or contributing.md file or the department guidelines.md file. Breaking a deliverable into the most minor task possible in a Jira, so you know each class/function you have to write and then find the original plan is not the reality when coding. Then story pointing the card, even if the task itself is less time to do than the effort spent in Jira and pointing. The religiously pairing and people being afraid to do work on their own. All while the deadline is slipping away, and no real work is getting done as the time is taken up by the process around the work rather than the work. You find yourself burnt out, wanting to quit for a simple life.
We know it's not so bad. On the outside, what more could we want? But it also takes its toll mentally. We've probably done much harder jobs in our youth, in call centres, working retail, labouring in factories for minimum wage 10-12hrs a day 6-7 days a week, juggling school with the rent, yet some of us still feel like this is the hardest it's been mentally.
I'm probably going to leave my position to go to a small ten person company. I find them much more fulfilling, no large processes, people turn up, do their work, may need to do more than their fair share as a small company, but you can see the progress and get a sense of achievement.
Gratitude is a good thing, but it’s not constructive to minimize someone’s happiness by comparing their situation to that of others. A shit sandwich with amazing bread still tastes like crap.
All problems can be compared to some other worse problem. It does not almost ever mean the original problem at hand is not worth giving attention.
[1] https://academy4sc.org/video/fallacy-of-relative-privation-a...