Jealousy is a Disease

To me jealousy is a disease. So many people are inflicted with it. It destroys your ability to think clearly, to justify normally and to see things how they really are. This virus stems from Envy. Envy is a situation where you desire to see a person fail regardless of what their intention is. You don’t want to emulate them or reach a higher goal in life. You just want them to be brought down. Have you really stopped and thought about how dysfunctional this behavior is? Why would you want someone diminished if their actions are not intended to cause any pain for you? If they did seek to cause you distress then your reaction should be justification and possibly compensation but not jealousy.

We have a society who now wants the successful people to be torn down. They don’t want to work as hard, study as much or do the things that others who have been successful did to get there. They just want them to be brought down. I was listening to a young college student say that America needs to be more like Cuba where they have free health care and education. Everybody is equal. Now that might seem a nice dream unless you actually visit Cuba and see the lifestyle up close and personal. What good does free health care do when there are only a handful of doctors and extremely poor hospitals and equipment. Whatever good can free education do for you if there is no opportunity in life? Why would you want to be equal when it means you live in squalor and destitute. To me this is an amazing lack of reality and critical thinking, just what jealousy and envy bring.

We see someone who appears to have more than we do. We rarely have all of the information but we know they should not be where they are. We don’t want to be them but we want them to be as sorry, lonely and dissatisfied as we are. That will not make us happy or satisfy us but somehow we need them to be miserable like us. You can actually pull yourself into deep depression with jealousy. It makes you look at life in a very ugly way.

How about instead of looking at things through the eyes of jealousy, we seek to emulate those who have accomplished so much or see that they are not really someone to be jealous about? Our lives would be more fulfilling. We would not be as depressed and angry. We could actually find an upward movement in all we do. Joy comes from a sense of accomplishment and that is brought about from positive attitude. Jealousy does not serve that goal, it destroys it. If we stop and think about what we might be jealous about rarely will we find a solid piece of evidence to let it go on.

We are amazing people capable of accomplishing amazing things. Jealousy is disease that will diminish our ability to do those things. It will bind us with despair and hate and it will overcome us by causing us to dedicated time to it. Next time a sense of jealousy creeps into your life, do yourself a great service by casting it out and focusing your efforts on improving yourself. It will produce a much more satisfying result.