The world would be a better place without ENVY.

Envy is one of the worst feelings within us. It is corrosive in its effects on our self esteem, on relationships, how we value one another, our perception of others, especially making us more judgemental and intolerant, and it dictates the quality of interaction we have with everyone else, especially those we grudge or aspire to be like. Altogether, envy leads to a desire for whatever someone else has which might make us feel inadequate or lesser in value.

For example, envy leads to unnecessary competition in society; the feeling that we have to keep up with the Joneses, to be the same as they are, in order to feel significant and valued. We don't feel right unless we are forever comparing ourselves to others. Yet no two people are alike and such competition does not take into account our inherent differences which are essential to our uniqueness. Thus we get into debt or damage ourselves emotionally or physically to achieve someone else's goals while we ignore our own equally valid ones.

Envy also robs us of compassion and makes us more intolerant of others. We are quicker to accuse, judge and condemn when we believe that person does not deserve what they have, neither our sympathy nor our love. We build up resentment against them and seek to destroy them instead. Envy lies at the root of how we treat others because when we are resentful of their accomplishments or their possessions, we become destructive towards them.

Finally, in our modern society, envy forms our attitude to others, especially how we treat people like celebrities whom we perceive to be 'better' than us. Not content to wanting to emulate them, we also take perverse pleasure in mocking them too which is why there is such prurient interest in celebrities and why we take much pleasure in seeing their discomfort. We like them, on one hand, for their entertainment value and the aspirations we can draw from them. But as we do not believe their attention and success are 'fair' or 'deserved', the envy within us seeks to 'cut them down to size' too, hence the ambiguous stance the media and public take in their treatment of the very celebrities they have helped to create.

The world would be a much better place without envy because we would perhaps appreciate our own individual strengths, uniqueness and compassion much more instead of constantly trying to be like others, then resenting who they are or what they have earned when we fail to reach their perceived heights.

Learn more about this author, Elaine Sihera.
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