A key ingredient to genuine happiness is gratitude—being happy with what you have. A key ingredient to being miserable is coveting what someone else has, and thinking you aren’t enough.
In this day and age it’s easier than ever to be jealous, because we have more access to each other’s lives than ever before. But we don’t have access to their real lives; instead, we have access to the idealized, filtered, highlight reel of their lives. And even though we know that what we see on social media isn’t “real,” it can really have a strong, often negative, effect on us.
Jealousy can be directed at many sources, and doesn’t just come from social media. We can be jealous of friends, family members, co-workers. We can grapple with jealousy in our relationships…when he talks to another girl, looks at another girl, mentions another girl.
Jealousy is an impulse, an emotion that sometimes leads to action. If it doesn’t, then it just festers within us and causes misery. You never feel at ease; you can never fully appreciate what you have; there is always that sense of lacking, a void that demands to be filled. Jealousy can range from being a hindrance in your everyday life to being dark and destructive, causing humans to do heinous things.
But where does it come from and how do we fix it? How can we stop being jealous and learn to truly love and embrace our own lives?
