Yesterday a long lost colleague of mine connected back after more than a decade or more. He talked about his life, how he battled severe illness, how his wife left him, and other tragedies that happened in same time (not going into too much detail), and eventually said he’d really like my help landing a job. I said yes and I will definitely do my part, but a part of me also wonders, do I trust what he told me because its been more than a decade now since we last connected, or do I take the good faith argument that all this is true. I mean if someone had to go through all that, they’d probably not be in contact with anyone either. Either way I just felt really bad for him - sometimes we get so focussed on our own life troubles that when we hear someone else going through 10x worse, our problems simply pale in comparison.