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Wellness Wednesday for April 3, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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How does one deal with envy and jealousy?

You could think about the things you have going for you, or people who have it worse than you.

Usually, I write George Bataille esque diatribes about the unrelenting awfulness of the universe.

Envy and jealousy tend to have to do with status seeking. Are you unhappy with your status relative to peers? Have you been marginalised or wronged? Is engaging in envy and jealousy helping you to improve your status? Or would you be better served setting up specific, reasonable targets for specific ways to improve your own status? To the extent it's even necessary to worry so much about this stuff - maybe you need to decrease the emotional stakes you put into this, too.

Non-productively?

A spiral into self loathing and day drinking, or taking out your rage on the object of your dissatisfaction.

Productively, as I presume you want to know?

The best way is self betterment. It's a sad fact that some people will always be strictly better than you on most criteria people, including you, care about, but the only way to handle that well is working on yourself, or at least trying to make peace with it.

Then again, envy and jealousy come in so many flavors, and we need to know what you're envious or jealous about before anyone can do more than speculate.