We are all humans with human feelings and emotions. It is natural for us to feel jealous when someone else gets what we don't have. First, we shouldn't feel guilty about the fact that we feel jealous. However, we need not dwell on it and make it worse.
You might think that I do not feel jealous of others because I have personally achieved a lot. Nothing could be further from the truth.
No matter where you are in life, there will be someone who has it more than you and there is a high chance that when you see someone have what you don't have you will feel jealous.
There are certain mental models I've developed to handle jealousy. I will share them here so that you can use the same framework to handle feelings of jealousy in your own life.
Mental Model 1: Will You Trade Your Life With Them?
This is the most important question to ask when you feel jealous of someone for not having what they have. Will you trade your life with their life?
If God gave you an option to put your soul in his/her body and put their soul in your body, will you take that deal? Obviously Not.
Whatever someone has or achieved is a sum total of all the things they have been through. They don't have what you have.
You just want one aspect of what they have and feel like it will be nice to have it yourself, but given an option, if you want to be them, most people will say no.
You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Let's compare this to cars. If you want an SUV with high ground clearance and off-roading capabilities, you have to give up on sporty handling and acceleration. If you buy a sports car that has great handling and super high acceleration, then you need to give up on high-ground clearance. If you go over a speed bump with a sports car, you might rub its belly.
Every human's achievements come from their past events. I am what I am today because of what I've gone through. I even had a point in my life where I was arrested and slept in a police station for two nights under illegal detention. You might not be able to handle such things. If you want what I have the only way to have it is to be me. If you look at the trauma I've gone through you will say No to my life.
Everyone is used to their own suffering and has learned how to handle it. You cannot import other's suffering into your life and export your suffering to their life. You will feel that your own suffering is far more manageable.
Most of the time, we only see what's on the outside. Instagram has made it worse for all of us. We post on social media about the highlights of our life and we see other's highlights. We think everyone's life is perfect and others think our life is perfect.
We do not realize that we only know the problems of our closest friends and family and we don't usually feel jealous of them.
Someone is rich but sick. Someone is healthy but broke. Someone is rich and fit but stuck in a toxic marriage. Someone has a great marriage but a sick kid. Someone has everything but recently lost one of his parents. The list goes on and on.
So stop comparing yourself with others. You don't compare yourself with a tree and feel jealous of the tree that the tree is so green and so tall. You don't feel jealous of a dog that the dog has such a great sense of smell and you don't. Because it's obvious that we are different from trees and dogs.
The problem of jealousy comes when we think and believe that we are not different from other humans. We don't feel jealous of Elon Musk or Steve Jobs because we know they are so different. But we often feel jealous of our cousins, classmates, etc. because we fool ourselves into thinking that we are all the same.
But God didn't even make a single carbon copy of any human on earth. We are all so unique and different and comparing ourselves with others and feeling jealousy is an insult to the power that made us unique and what we are today.
Mental Model 2: Celebrate Other's Success (Not Their Fall)
The second mental model I use to handle jealousy is to celebrate when others succeed. If you have a son who achieved a lot of material success, you will feel happy for him. However, why do you feel sad when someone else achieves success? Why do you celebrate when someone else fails?
We think that if someone else succeeds, they are taking away what you might get. But that's a scarcity mindset. You think that someone else's success is bad for you because you think that they are taking it away from you. But we live in a world of abundance.
If you are around people who are succeeding, there is a high chance that it will help you as inspiration. And it helps to be around people who have abundance.
If you are around people who are in scarcity, there is a chance that they will feel jealous of you and try to take things away from you. It’s better to be in a situation where we feel jealous of others than be in a situation where others feel jealous of us.
There is a saying. "I helped a man climb the mountain and I realized that I too had reached the top."
If you help people achieve more, you can take pride in it, whether they realize it or not, and feel happy about it. The mentee should always surpass the mentor, always, else the mentor will not be successful. I have helped so many people grow, but I have never felt bad.
Lift people and you will be lifted. Yes, there might be some people who will run away after you helped them climb the ladder, but there are more people left who need help and one of them will help you back and that's enough. Only look at what you gain, not what they gain.
People often say no to things if it means that others also won't get it. It gives them an ego satisfaction. That's a lose-lose proposition.
Go for win-win deals even if the other person is winning more than you, it's ok. You will also win, one way or the other.
Mental Model 3: We Are All Going To Dust In 100 Years
If you still can't handle someone's success, remember that we are all going to dust in 100 years. In 1000 years, there might be no record of us having existed. There is a chance that humans will nuke each other and become extinct. Everything is temporary.
We all want to be alive and while we are alive, we should have immense gratitude for being alive in this time-space reality.
No matter how much anyone has, no one can take anything away from this world. We all die with empty hands. The Grim Reaper is coming for all of us.
From moment to moment, everything is transitory. Everything changes. Life is so short.
A billionaire cannot buy one more life as much as a beggar cannot. We would all choose to be a alive beggar rather than a dead Alexander, the Great.
No one is great if they are dead because once you are dead, who is great? Where there is life to feel great?
You have to train your mind to learn the temporary nature of everything in this universe. Aniccha. Meditation and Vipassana help a lot in this aspect.
So that's my three major mental models for handling jealousy.
Jealousy is a negative emotion and we should handle it intelligently when it shows up in our life. I hope this post helps you live a better and more happy life.
Comment below with your thoughts.
Have you ever felt jealous of someone?
How did it feel? What are you going to do about it?
Hi Deepak, it is good. Articulated well. Practical models to adopt and adhere. Thanks. Keep it up.