Can we really get to the top, without pushing another person down?
If you stood first in class, or if you topped your class for 5 years, chances are that half the class hated you. Chuck topping a class, getting a decent distinction would make people jealous.
Not all of them, but a good chunk.
Chances are if you have been vigilant, the more things you achieve, the more people you make disgruntled.
The only difference was, if you won a sports championship back in school, you were celebrated because you represented your school. But as soon as you graduated from school, and got into College, where people don’t associate to institutions that much, the number of jealous people increased.
You won an individual event there, you made many people sad.
Then you graduated college, and forayed into the professional world, and this problem amplified even more.
When you get a decent achievement in life, there are people YOU KNOW who aren’t happy with it.
You see their passive aggressiveness as soon as you talk to them. They simply cannot be happy with your happiness, and you as why? The whole social media industry is driven by this phenomenon.
70% of the population wants to post awesome pictures on the social media for the simple fact that they love to make people envious. And this just points to the fact that we actually know that our success does make people jealous. But we still go ahead and post it anyway. And people will “like” and “heart” the posts we make. We keep playing this game of “being happy” for the other person whereas the actual truth is –
People don’t give a shit.
They actually do not really care about the success you get. It doesn’t matter if your success doesn’t even overlap remotely in their fields, but it is still there.
But why?
There are many reasons to this. One of them is looking at other people and their lives more than the lives of our own. We are being constantly bombarded with photos of our lives and happenings of our FB “friends”, often resulting in outbursts like –
“If I see one more engagement picture I am getting off from Facebook!”
There was a time when we had 5-6 good friends we would talk to.
News to their engagement usually brought immense happiness, not grumpiness. Now we are blasted with an engagement pic every week. Obviously, you cannot be happy for all of them. You do not even know half of them, to be honest.
The same holds true for most of your friends.
Why will they be happy for your promotion? Or your overseas trip, when their feed is littered with posts where you have checked into 1000 places in one foreign city you went to.
The second reason is pure envy.
Everyone wants to be at the top. Everyone wants filtered perfect Instagram photos of gorgeous beaches in their background. Everyone wants to check into Manchester United Old Trafford during their cursory England business visit. And if they see you do it, they want to do it too. Everyone wants everything as soon as they see that someone else has gotten it already.
People forget that not everyone can go Goa at the same time. Not everyone can get a promotion at the same time. Not everyone gets engaged at the same time.
People need to understand that for everyone, things happen differently.
But in this age, where you know everything about everyone – down to the point where you know where your 6th standard classmate has eaten for lunch yesterday, the world has gotten too small.
And when it gets too crowded, obviously people get uncomfortable. Jealousy was always there. The emotion is nothing new. Some people always got jealous.
But now that everything is in our face, we just see more of it, just like the omnipresent engagement pictures on Facebook.
Cover Image Source