I am looking for a term to describe the line of thinking that goes something like “I hate my work, I am sick all the time, I am depressed, I can’t find happiness. But I should be happy. Those problems don’t matter. All my problems are so insignificant, there are little. They’re just some stupid first world problems. I have it good, I have food on the table and a loving family. There are millions of people who have real problems, people living in severe poverty, starving to death, being bombed.”
I think about this often, it came up when I was talking with someone with mental health issues and I remember him telling me that this way of thinking has a name/is a common symptom that occurs in people with a specific personality disorder, although I cannot remember what disorder he claimed it was. Also this was more than ten years ago so it might have either changed or my memory of this event changed.
Martyr complex
That would be the exact opposite from what OP describes, where a person goes “Oh woe me, all the weight of the world is on my shoulders and I get zero acknowledgment!”
I guess somewhere between the extremes is a healthy range of “My life sucks, and so does everybody else’s.”
You’re incorrect. A martyr complex doesn’t require that the sufferer bemoans others for a lack of acknowledgement, or that they think their problems are worse in comparison; just that they feel that they are constantly suffering for some cause that they may or may not justify to themselves.
Abusive relationships are an example of where this kind of martyrdom occurs.