This snippet from Brian Phillp's piece on MTV.com seems relevant here:
The world can destroy you in a million different ways. Because we are selfish and because our experience is small, most of us, at any given moment, are conscious of only a few of them. Our own problems seem vivid and tragic, but other people's problems seem a little blurry, even when we're trying to understand them. If you have never gone hungry, starvation is bound to look vague; if you've never been denied something you deserve because of how you look, or been attacked because someone larger than you felt entitled to your body, or felt alone and crazy for no reason, or been cheated, or been sick, then each of these sources of suffering probably feels less urgent than whatever specific adversity you have experienced. It's human nature. Your heartbreak feels bigger than someone else's war.
The proper response to this state of things, I think, is humility, along with a certain kind of trust in the face of other people's suffering: to try to believe what other people say about what they're going through, and to take it to heart. The basic gesture of moral imagination is, after all, to put yourself in someone else's place.