You have just got a raise. But many of your colleagues or contemporaries did not get it. Obviously, they will come to you and congratulate you. Those who are genuine and good friends will indeed feel happy for you. They would feel good about you getting the raise or attaining whatever other success not obtained by everybody else. But you will also hear from those who are not that genuine. From those who would rather not see you get the raise. From those who would do all they can to make sure you do not succeed.
If you ponder deeply and observe closely, the congratulations would be louder and more vociferous from those people who do not feel happy about it. When you have to convince yourself to do something that is against your deep feelings, you have to be forceful, persistent, loud and overtly clear. The same happens for the people who have to suppress their frustration and angst to look happy and benevolent. A genuine person would just congratulate you casually and move on. A phony person would be loud, partly to force you to believe in what is being said and partly to suppress that person's own ego & frustration.
Those who are not happy within and are forced to look happy on the outside will have to make visible effort to look genuine. It is this forceful effort that kills the whole thing. Such persons are either too polite or too loud or too descriptive or too virtuous. Any superlative is visible. So is people's articulation of artificially enforced feelings.
This is accentuated by envy. The people are so envious of your success that they muster a lot of courage and effort to congratulate on the outside while sulking on the inside. Their congratulations will be more elaborate. They would include a lot of indirect questions inside their elaborate message to extract the trick of the trade from your answers. Did you get special favors. Did you use special connections? Who helped you? Did you do something to make your bosses happy? Did you create some external influence? Can those tools be shared or transferred? Are you happy with your boss? And on and on and on.
Sometimes, people are driven by their envy to even be subservient to you so that they can get a few of the tricks so that they can use later. You success shows that you are either more capable or are more valued by the organization or management. And this is what the envious cannot stand. They can lose themselves but they cannot see others move forward. It is more painful for them to see you succeed than to see themselves fail.
Envy is a curious thing. In Nepali, there is a saying that monkey destroys both own and other's homes. Same monkey tendency is present in people with envy. They are forever unhappy with their own disposition and always feel a jolt when somebody around them attains something - material or immaterial, worldly or spiritual, wealth or health, friends or a raise. They simply cannot stand any good happing to others.
From greatest villains in history to a normal next door neighbor or next cabin colleague, a envious person is a symbol of pervasive unhappiness and negativity. They cannot be truly happy however great they achieve because someone else around them is also getting successful ant this they cannot stand.
Thursday 26 December 2019 (10 Poush 2076)
No comments:
Post a Comment