The Insidious Cancer of Envy - and How to Get Past It

Just the other day I noticed, yet again, that people have a way of being resentful when others have some sort of mild success. I posted this comment on facebook and was interested to note that many people felt the same way. In fact a LOT of people felt the same way.

So why is it that instead of being happy for someone else's success we find that others tend to want to criticize, belittle, and reduce their achievement? That's not the popular attitude as projected by Hollywood. There if one does something good and praiseworthy everyone jumps up and down and celebrates and is happy - except the bad guys who usually wind up somewhere unpleasant. That's Hollywood, which polarizes the emotions into different figures. In the real world one is much more likely to run into false smiles and waves of negativity, even amid one's friends. 'Huh,' goes the refrain, 'that's not so great. I coulda done that...'

A variant on this is the subtle way people can look down on success. People can be happy for what you achieve, as long as they can say in the next breath that of course you didn't get rich doing it (for example), or that you suffered in some other real or imagined way. Here's an example: 'Van Gogh was a genius, but of course, mentally terribly tortured...' Is that why we like his work? Because he was an artistic success who reassured us that success wasn't worth it at that price - which in turn excuses our own lack of successes? Is this the basis of the myth of the creative genius who is self-destructive? The mad genius? But wait: Shakespeare wasn't like that, nor Goethe, nor Milton, nor Franklin.....

What we have here, my friends, are excuses for mediocrity; those consoling attitudes we all, to some extent, are inclined to preserve, because if we hold on to them they stop us from having to even try for real success, or personal actualization.

This is Orphan culture. It's time to move beyond it.

Let us allow ourselves to be wholeheartedly happy for others' successes, and even for their attempts at success. Let us revel in the fact that people are doing their best to make personal progress. And let's also make sure we don't accept any excuses for our own lack of motivation.