Suddenly, you feel
anxious. Your body heats up. As you are trying to put a smile upon your face
which feels like an incredibly horrible zombie clown grin that would have won
you every Halloween contest, you look to the person of your current interest.
Said person is surrounded by a gleaming and glittering shimmer and looks so
gorgeous, content, popular, amazing, talented, and successful that you want to turn
your bedazzled gaze away. Dark armies of sour monsters are seeping deeply into
your heart. The happier this person gets the nearer you stand at your personal
abysses. You want to scream and rip something apart, you wish this person would
drop dead now and then you would dance furiously of joy on his grave – but the
next second you feel sick because you even dared to imagine something like
that, you want to leave the place and run away. Far away so that you never have
to see that person again, look him in the eyes so that he possibly sees in
yours what you were depicting and bringing all the fierce wrath of hell over
you with a Siamese smile for your sinful thought… Envy at its best.
We have all met a
person like this at least once in our lives. And if you did not (yet), enjoy
the innocence you are blessed with. When we envy someone two paths build up in
front of us. We can either take our negative feelings towards this particular
person; use them as fuel to actuate all our engines and strive for the one
situation that will make us feel better – to outrival the other. Or we can’t
handle this mass of intimidating impressions and let ourselves be overrun by
them which would be a self-harming and disastrous situation. We might never
recover from it and our self-esteem would be forever infiltrated.
Envy causes us to look down on other people, to pity them. We say that they lack character to push our own egos and search for affirmation through comparison, so that we feel superior and ascertained that we did “right” in our lives and they did not. Envy can thus turn into arrogance easily. But these envied personalities often are not even aware that they are envied. In a situation like this I am the one who lacks character because I refrain from admitting a truth, that someone is indeed better that I am, that I perhaps did not do everything possible to excel. I have to trivialise the achievements of others to bring them under the level of mine. This is an extremely uncomfortable social state because I often know what I am doing to relieve my wounded pride.
Envy causes us to look down on other people, to pity them. We say that they lack character to push our own egos and search for affirmation through comparison, so that we feel superior and ascertained that we did “right” in our lives and they did not. Envy can thus turn into arrogance easily. But these envied personalities often are not even aware that they are envied. In a situation like this I am the one who lacks character because I refrain from admitting a truth, that someone is indeed better that I am, that I perhaps did not do everything possible to excel. I have to trivialise the achievements of others to bring them under the level of mine. This is an extremely uncomfortable social state because I often know what I am doing to relieve my wounded pride.
Why is it so hard for us to admire this person instead? If we took him or her as a role model we would probably improve faster with a certainly more settled mind. My starting point presumes a common interest on both sides. As an author you would not envy a Nobel laureate in the scientific category. What really agitates our minds is when people share a field of interest, a value or a belief with us. When these people exceed us, we often start to search for features and skills in them which we do not command. And if a feature or a skill seems to be uniquely possessed by them or at least by a very few people we might call these instincts.
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