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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2113 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for October 9, 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:

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Anyone have tips for combatting the green-eyed monster? I often find myself begrudging others’ successes and good fortune. My resentment applies to friends [1], but also extends to people whom I barely know in passing (or even public figures).

[1] Although am I really their friend if I react this way?

Do you begrudge their success in the sense that it increases sensitivity to your own lack of success, or in the sense that you value your friends less? If it is only the former, I think that’s a good feeling to have

”Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little”

I think a healthy human becomes upset when their friends succeed far ahead of them, as it means that they are falling behind their peers, and identity is created through comparison to peers. Totally normal feeling. I think Pascal wrote about this and it was the subject of that book “A Separate Peace”. But the envy should propel you to do productive things rather than ruminate.

I'll give an unorthodox answer - figure out what you really want in life, what will make you happy and genuinely not jealous of anyone else, and pursue it relentlessly.

If you think it'll be 5-10 years before you get it, try to reprioritize what you want a bit and see if you can be satisfied with something easier to get somewhere along the way.

Working with your desire instead of fighting it is useful. Then you can reframe envy into admiration, and incorporate it into your goals.

You need to anchor your own self esteem to something that is, for you, concrete.

If you have some time to invest, I'd suggest you read "Sadly, Porn." In either case I'll poorly summarize with many assertions without evidence (as goes the source material)

The urge that ensures we eat is hunger. The urge that makes us social is a type of pleasure from preventing someone else getting what they want. It is equivalent to our will to power. However this can be deeply antisocial and in modern times you'll be excommunicated for stating the truth.

The lie we most commonly tell to convince others (and ourselves) that we never hunger is the ledger. They don't deserve that because it is not fair. They owe me for how I helped them. Justifications for dessert. The ledger is pro social if your accounting is good, but the point of it is to cook the books.

Your envy is you trying to use the ledger to get to dessert. But the ledger is fake and your math is bad. There gain is not your loss and even if it were that's not why you are here.

Your prescription is to either to stop lying to yourself that there is a ledger. Satisfy this hunger when it doesn't truly hurt someone, not just when you have moral cover. Alternatively you could get better at accounting so your attempts to cook the books aren't convincing to yourself. I'd recommend the second because it is easier.

I've read that book, but I didn't understand this part as well as you have (I just assumed it was because I hadn't read Lacan, but maybe I just missed something) I do want to point out that the ledger is of course nonsense, but also that it's useful to create the concept, because it makes life into a meritocracy. That human beings manipulate reward systems (wireheading or goodhart's law) rather than just chasing the rewards like they're meant to, is a different problem.

It's not just hunger, suffering works the same. You're hungry until you eat, and you make yourself unhappy "until you reach that goal, after which you will deserve happiness". We're afraid of letting go of suffering though, because of the belief that we won't reach our goal if we do (or the belief that we might even forget about the goal (this is why using a calender can reduce ones anxiety by a lot)). The "wireheading" when it comes to suffering is avoidance, procrastinating, distracting ourselves from what we're meant to do. Another example is shame and guilt. It's "invented" in order to motivate certain behaviour. You can dismiss them as nonsense, but then you also lose the benefit they were created to bring (for instance, if we accept that we're just a product of our environments and thus not to blame for anything, then how do we convince eachother not to be criminals?)

You've arrived at something quite insane and act like it's some forbidden truth...

Mostly just offering a different perspective. I'm significantly less convinced than my writing would suggest, but I haven't really seen many/any good competing theories to be honest. I'd like to point out that your response makes less sense than mine despite probably being more helpful. If it is "plain stupid to be envious" why would we have created envy. It is a part of human society we've been struggling with forever.

The urge that makes us social is a type of pleasure from preventing someone else getting what they want. It is equivalent to our will to power. However this can be deeply antisocial and in modern times you'll be excommunicated for stating the truth.

Wait what?? No it's not. On a fundamental level humans need allies. You don't get together with people just to harm them. Friendship is much closer to a stag hunt than a prisoner's dilemma.

The rational/evolutionary reason for wanting a social impulse is making allies. The mechanism by which that is implemented is crude.

Also just because you are denying them something they want does not mean you are making their life worse.

I don't know where you're getting this but it just isn't true. There are a thousand ways to interact with people and a thousand ways to derive enjoyment from those interactions. Sociality is how you win allies, find potential romantic partners, learn new information, make connections, etc.

I suppose in some very limited way there is some pleasure in denying others what they want, inasmuch as you're playing a status game, but that's quite a small fraction of the emotion involved in human interaction. At least for emotionally healthy people.

I'll ask the obvious question: Is this related at all to what is presented on social media? Some of the most broken, miserable, and neurotic people I know have quite striking social media presences. One very lovely young woman recently had all these Instagram stories of her done up in various chic outfits, including a kimono, having won some most beautiful somebody in XYZ prefecture. She's probably one of the most fragile women I've ever met and probably undiagnosed psychotic. But she has a slapping Instagram. It's a cliché to write, but social media isn't real. It's a chimera. Probably just uninstall all of it.

If the answer to question one is No, my other advice is equally maudlin: Ask yourself what you want to do or be, and then do that thing or become that person.

Spend some time thinking seriously about what you, personally, truly need to be happy. You’re one of eight billion people in the world. Everything you have is better and worse than what others have. But how does it relate to what you actually need to find happiness? I am not saying, necessarily, don’t be ambitious, or don’t be materialistic. But at the same time, no matter what you acquire or achieve, there will probably always be someone else who has more or better. It’s a near-endless ladder to climb. Establish what rungs you actually need to reach.

I like our house. There are unquestionably nicer houses than ours, several of which are in our very neighborhood, within walking distance that I see every day. Is our house an actual impediment to my happiness in and of itself? Absolutely not. I love our fireplace and the view from our second story picture window. Don’t let endless comparison be the thief of joy.

I've found (more broadly than just this), that small amounts of self-direction can help over time. Literally tell yourself "I'm happy for him/her" and reject your emotional reactive as not your true opinion. This may not work if you have a very overwhelming emotional reaction, but in most scenarios where you're emotions co-exist with even a seed of a detached cogntive rejection of the emotions, just feed that seed and mentally reenforce it as the true perspective.

One can also supplement this with actions that correlate with the desired feelings, since feelings are both up- and downsteam from behaviour. In this case that could mean you congratulate or even give presents to people who've got some recent win.

You're probably a friend still, but a kinda bad friend currently.

You should read up on the phenomenon. It's plain stupid to be envious. It doesn't lead to anything good. You don't gain anything from feeding that wolf. You're liable to lose something if/when people discover it. It causes only misery and no pleasure, ever. Why would you get on that cart?

You might try practicing mudita (sympathetic joy). Start small and easy, with some person or animal you don't mind seeing having pleasure. Then expand to something more difficult and see what feelings come up (and ask your body and mind why).

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