Yesterday at work the boss was getting onto a teenage girl for never doing the cleaning she should be doing before she left work. The girl burst into tears and quit her job on the spot. That surprised me because - to me at least - the incident did not seem to warrant weeping and walking out. But from her reaction, the boss chewing her out for not doing her job made her whole world just completely collapse.
I made the observation (not aloud, but to myself) that humans seem to have one mental scale, and we seem to resize all our experiences to fit that scale. An incident may be the best or worst thing that has ever happened to us, simply because we don't yet know any better or worse things than this incident. A child gets a new bike or a new tablet computer and it's a wonderful thing that puts him on cloud nine. An adult gets one and it's just another tool to use in his life. An eighteen year old boy/man is told he needs to leave home and start a life of his own and it wrecks his world. The same man loses his job at fifty-three years of age and it's not all that bad because he lost his mother four years ago.
I wonder how that teenage girl will see yesterday's incident when she remembers it twenty years from now. And sometimes I wonder how the events of my life that seem so great or terrible now will look to me when I am older and have more experiences against which to scale them.