This reminds me of Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning, where he compared pain to air molecules--a given room might have more or less of them, but they spread out to fill the entire room. Similarly, problems, whether large or small, fill a given life and it's not meaningful to compare them.

And you know, if there's one thing to make my problems feel insignificant it would be knowing that my psychiatrist had survived and lost his family to Nazi death camps, but Frankl rejected the idea that people who had suffered less than he did should suck it up. Maybe he felt much like M.D. did, he didn't want to be the brick-holder all the time and wanted to help others, especially since his work as a psychiatrist was part of his identity. Plus, I don't think he wanted to be the kind of person who goes through life obsessed about the magnitude of his suffering and poo-pooing everyone else's.

At one point in the book Frankl talks about helping a diplomat who was uncertain whether to continue his career, a poster boy for first-world problems if there ever was one. Yet Frankl didn't minimize or invalidate his patient's problem at all, so what excuse do the rest of us have? Good job having M.D. make that point and drive it home through lively dialogue and interaction.