The person who rants incessantly that their $500 iPhone drops an occasional call is living in a very different world from someone who worries about finding food and shelter. The former is experiencing first-world problems, a phrase that acknowledges or reminds us that if our only problems are of the first-world variety, we actually don’t have much to complain about. It’s all about maintaining our perspective.
Much of the anxiety I see students and parents experiencing around the college admissions process comes from focusing on first-world problems.
I’ve done seminars for families whose primary concern is getting an admission to an Ivy League school. I’ve also done them for foster kids who’ve grown up without stable homes or families, who will be totally on their own to put themselves through college.
I’ve talked to students who are frustrated that their SAT scores still don’t crack 2000, and I’ve talked to one student who was completely deaf and had to sit in the front row of his classes so that he could read the teachers’ lips.
I worked with one student who was so incensed when his football coach decided not to start him, he quit the team in protest. That same year, I worked with a starting wide receiver who quit his football team to take care of his mother who was dying of cancer.
Getting frustrated with first-world problems is something we all do. There are days when I get unreasonably irritated by the slow progression of the line at the grocery store and completely forget how long the line is at the homeless shelter six blocks away.
But if the thing that keeps you up at night is worrying whether or not Yale will say yes, if you’re enraged and want to raise academic hell because your Spanish teacher gave you a B, if you didn’t get the part you wanted in the school play, if you didn’t get to pitch on your all-star team last week, or you didn’t quite make the cut for AP chemistry, or the kid down the street got into Harvard and you’re stuck going to Michigan (I actually heard a student say that once), it’s frustrating. I hear you.
But you know what? First-world problems—all of them.
When you feel first-world frustrations creeping in, take a deep breath and remind yourself how lucky you are to have the opportunity to go to college at all, to learn what you want to learn and to have so much freedom to decide what direction you want your life to take. Those opportunities are gifts that plenty of people in this world could never imagine receiving.
When first-world problems frustrate you, that’s a sure sign that life is good.