Oof! I have thoughts..

As an engineering student, she said exam times are particularly difficult.

"You can smell people from across the room who've been cramming for exams ..." she said.

Sydney optometrist, Lauren Leung

Or they're nervous, or they have a medical condition, or there's many other reasons... What a horribly vain person to think she knows the reason why someone might not smell nice out of 20 or more people crammed in a room for over an hour together. Glad she has the foresight to appreciate she takes her vanity too far.

John built a multi-million-dollar air-conditioning business from the ground up in western Sydney's Mount Druitt and believes whingeing limits our potential.

What a lovely, positive outlook. Maybe right, maybe wrong, but positive nonetheless... then proceeds to participate in a favourite past-time of tradies, whinge about his apprentices...

"We have it with our apprentices.

"After a year and a half of being an apprentice, they want to be the CFO."

How oblivious can you get?

Although people struggle with different things, the psychologist says we must be careful of "competitive suffering", the act of comparing or ranking one's suffering against others.

"This idea that we hold onto now that 'my pain is worse than anyone's ever in history' becomes a problem ... like I think 1850s for women [was] probably not a great time [neither was wartime in the 1940s] ...

Good point, but we really don't need to be looking back in history for comparisons that give us some perspective. It's a real pick and mix out there at the moment of horrible lives being lived that we compare ourselves to, from war, genocide, famine, and natural disasters. This isn't a time to look at the past, this is a time to look at our neighbours, and outreach our hands to them.