See also: whitewhine.com

Also worth a listen - First World Problem by MC Frontalot, which I believe is sampled in the video above.

if these are your problems, then yeah, this video probably provides some perspective.  but...to make what seems like it should be an obvious point...very few people even in the u.s. have the upper class privileged spoofed in the video.  sometimes it's hard to talk about the nation-based privilege or the privilege of living in "the 1st world" while also examining social and economic divisions within wealthy nations.

I get the point, but there is also danger in playing oppression Olympics. When I was suicidal and anorexic, the reaction I got from a lot of people was that I had nothing to complain about, that people in developing countries had "real problems", etc. That was pretty harmful. Some first world problems are still deadly.

This whole "first world problem" trend irritates the hell out of me.  I can't watch the video (because my internet connection is too slow at the moment- OMG FIRST WORLD PROBLEM!!), but I'm sure it's the same stuff that is being posted on twitter and the various "problem" sites.  Things like "my coworker ate my yogurt" and "they don't have the shoe I want in my size" aren't "problems, they're annoyances and you're a spoiled brat.  Don't lump me into your immature whining just because I live in "the first world".  I'd love to think most of these things are submitted/said somehow ironically, but I doubt that's the case. 
 
I'm sorry.  I know this added nothing intelligent to the conversation, but I needed to vent.  As you were.. :) 

While I get the critique implicit in the "First Wold Problems" discourse, I also fear it continues a long and problematic history of Othering and homogenizing nations in the Global South.  Think Edward Said, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, etc.

"Dmitriy T.M. sent in his hilarious 2-minute rap..."
Is this actually his or did you forget a "t"?

Back in the good ol' Brazil, what I thought of as being "First world problems" was quite different from what is depicted in this video, rightly or wrongly. Usually, it would be things like that lady who sued McDonald's because their coffee burned her crotch, and even issues I see on SocImages, like the "decreasing diversity of crops," or equity studies peeps and some of their word games (and how ineffective I found them to be, and still do somewhat.)

I mean, I'm not arguing that I was correct in all of the notions I had — I was quite young —, or even that everybody Brazilian shared them, but I knew quite a few that did. Nevertheless, the First world problems meme as it is depicted around these quarters, as people have argued below, is somewhat based on unrealistic notions of what people care about in the "developing world." I mean, nobody has perfect priorities. Trust.

That's a really funny satire, but I think it's more accurate to think of these as

"privileged people problems", as they they could apply to the rest of the world.  Actually, I don't want to overgeneralize without knowing for sure, but in Europe at least, even the poorest countries (Moldova, Albania, Kosovo) have minorities that experience these kinds of "problems".  And these are countries with frequent power cuts, water shortages, and scarce availability of basic items, yet some people there live in unspeakable luxury.  
While it's undoubtedly good to have a humble and grateful perspective on our lives, you can only take the comparing and contrasting the magnitude of any sort of problem to the less fortunate so far.  Privilege or even just a modest but secure upbringing in a "first world" country as opposed to a poorer, more volatile country may be cushions, but one can still fall hard.

Heh, I love this kind of observation. My friends and i even had a running gag calling petty problems "first world problem of the day" after this series

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuIZ9E4T8uQ

(Among the more important dialogue theres: "why couldn't you part closer to the automat?", "all the channels, where are the bloody news", "the site takes too long to download" and "chips are too small to dip"...)

When i see someone reflecting on how privileged they are, i tend to see them as smug or complacent. I grew up reading a lot of European WWII era and holocaust literature. The theme was traumatic and sudden bourgeois downward mobility. Today's first world can be tomorrow's soup queue. This idea seems to have been lost. The view that nothing 'really bad' can happen these days (in the western world) is what I keep harping on about as the end-of-history fallacy.

I find this offensive.  Those are upper-middle class problems.  Here are my first world problems, and I don't think they are unusual:

-Trying to pay rent on a just-over-minimum-wage salary

-Not having the money to pay for medical care (without insurance, of course) to treat the chronic health problems my abusive childhood, repeated sexual assault, and unfortunate genetics left me with

-Managing physical pain from day to day and trying to still be productive

-Not having the money to buy food that will be sustainable and protect my long-term health

-Wondering what I can do to mitigate my part in imperialism and environmental destruction when I don't have enough income to buy groceries And save for retirement 

-Fighting my internalized racism and sexism

-Trying to have a fulfilling family/social life and be a contributing member of my community when my work hours keep me busy nights, weekends, and holidays

And I'm above the poverty line.

Class erasure! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

I'm pretty sure this kid just ripped of MC Frontalot's "First World Problems" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3w1_E1V46M

Meh.  I'm going to jump on the "I don't like this" bandwagon.  It's one thing to use "first world problems" to bring people whining about minute inconveniences back to reality, but the trend has escalated from calling out whiny people to basically saying "other people have it worse" to dismiss real issues.  Hunger, racism, sexism, violence, rape, poverty, and all of that DO exist in the first world, and dismissing people's complaints because "there is a starving baby in Africa, you live in America so therefore you have no real problems" is not going to make any issue in any country disappear.  "First world problems" has just become a meme for wealthier people to dismiss each other, and people who are less fortunate than them, just because they don't like hearing other people complain, regardless of whether the complaint is valid or not.

Also worth mentioning, I don't think all "first world" problems are the same; I recently visited another wealthier country, and many residents there are very quick to dismiss American's complaints of things like grocery gaps and lack of health care using similar rhetoric.  They don't have those issues, at least not nearly as widespread, so they assume "America is another wealthy country, in fact wealthier than us, so there is no way that people are hungry or lacking medical care there."  And yet, that country probably has other issues that I, as an American, wouldn't immediately realize, and still may be legitimate issues, EVEN IF people in poorer countries have it worse