Jealousy. It's raiding your town! It's eating your children!! It's making you impossible to be friends with!!! Won't anyone please just think of the children!?!?
The strange thing I've noticed about the Average Joe/Jane is that the Average can't be happy for you because they subconsciously fear that it would come at the expense of their own happiness. There is also a common misconception within the Average, in which they believe that knocking down your happiness would give them the resources to build on their own happiness, and it should be done because the measure of their happiness should always be greater than yours. But they're wrong. They're wrong and they don't realize it.
I'm no scientist, I've built no laboratory, but my studies have shown that humans can be happy for themselves and others. People aren't machines. They don't run out of happiness juice and sputter on roads, calling AAA for tow because they ran empty on happiness from using it on other people and can no longer move until someone else fills them back up again. Well, thank goodness, because I don't think an insurance plan would cover it ("Oh I'm sorry sir, you're going to have to contribute a $20 co-pay for us to infuse happiness back into you from this donor here").
Analogies aside, jealousy is simply put, a damaging thing. I mean, just take a good look at the definition of envy:
en•vy |ˈenvē|
noun ( pl. -vies)
a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else's possessions, qualities, or luck : she felt a twinge of envy for the people on board.• ( the envy of) a person or thing that inspires such a feeling : their national health service is the envy of many in Europe.
verb ( -vies, -vied) [ trans. ]
desire to have a quality, possession, or other desirable attribute belonging to (someone else) : he envied people who did not have to work on weekends | [with two objs. ] I envy Jane her happiness.• desire for oneself (something possessed or enjoyed by another) : a lifestyle that most of us would envy.
DERIVATIVES
envier |ˈenvēər| |ˈɛnviər| noun
ORIGIN Middle English (also in the sense [hostility, enmity] ): from Old French envie (noun), envier (verb), from Latin invidia, from invidere ‘regard maliciously, grudge,’ from in- ‘into’ + videre ‘to see.’
Jealousy and envy aren't just from bitterly wanting or wishing for spiteful justice. Sometimes, the feeling just leaves you feeling dissatisfied or unhappy. The origin of the word itself comes from the sense of hostility, maliciousness--a feeling of wanting to do harm. This is true, but why? Are we all just so insecure with ourselves that we can't be certain of our own value without first comparing it by an arbitrary unit of measure (that we create by our own perception) of someone else? And if so, why does the easy solution lead to lowering the value of that other person's life--why can't the easy answer just lead to redefining the measure with which you see your own life?
One of my favorite quotes has always been a simple, but true quote by Albert Camus:
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
Which leads me to believe that if you aren't happy, we could take this concept in reverse to put things back into perspective.
i.e.
i.e.
Are you unhappy because you're attempting to follow a life arbitrarily defined between yourself and the unknown external?
e.g.
- Are you updating your friends and family to keep in touch with your lives, or are you updating an intangible tier of recognition for achievements between yourselves? Are you rushing, and if so, are you rushing because you're just really excited, or because it is imperative that they know?
- Will you only be proud of what you have or what you've done after you've announced it, after it had been acknowledged by others?
- Who is reviewing your photo albums and check-ins, you or others? Will you be content with the fact that you remembered the event and that your friends won't see every little detail of it, or did you want to be the first, and the most, and the best foodie, traveler, etc.? Is this picture actually cool, or is it just proof that you were there?
- Are you contributing constructive criticism and evoking thought to help someone, or are these questions and statements hurtful, rubbing salt in their wounds, or even have some passive-aggressive implications?
How much do we even know about someone else's life? Isn't it all just based on what they tell us, anyways? If we each have our own struggles, we have our own happiness. Nobody should be able to take the importance of either away from us, and we shouldn't be taking any value of it away from each other. Our lives are so complex, it's so difficult to compare each other one factor at a time. So how's about we end the cycle and just be happy with our own lives, celebrate with others, and empathize as we are all members of the same human race? We could respect what we do and do not know about each other, and not let it unnecessarily affect how we measure our own lives (or how we meddle in their's).
