When you workout the first time, your body goes into to shock. Your threshold to experience fatigue is low. Eventually, you build tolerance and it takes a greater intensity for your body to feel the same exhaustion it did when you hadn’t been exposed to it.

And I think it’s the same with pain.

Your threshold for experiencing it increases and it takes a more intense stimulus to affect you the same way something less intense might have affected you before.

So you can’t compare people’s pain, because each person has a unique threshold for experiencing it.

The pain a 9 year old experiences having a bike stolen, could be comparable to the pain a 50 year old experiences at the unexpected death of a spouse, because even thought the stimuli might be objectively incomparable, each individuals capacity for experiencing them is different.