I will start with a very, very weird manifestation of envy: we strangely (but innately) prefer to have less rather than more, WHEN the *more* is less than our neighbors’ BUT the *less* is more than our neighbors’. Friends, the inverse rarely holds.
Carefully consider these two scenarios:
Scenario 1: you worth $865,080, while your closest neighbor worth $1,030,000.
OR
Scenario 2: you worth $543,200, while your closest neighbor worth $304, 000.
Most Homo sapiens will prefer scenario 2: that is, we prefer to have less inasmuch as our neighbors do not have more than us. (Again, only a minuscule of us, can deny Schadenfreude, at least in it’s mildest form).
Disrupting this time-wasting (and unhealthy) entrapment, leads the path to a very fine level of cognitive freedom.
A Yoruba proverb enlightens us:
ilara alaju ni mmuni gbaje, ni mmuni seso
Excessive envy of others causes one to take on witching (and if care is not taken) turn one into a wizard.
Theodore Gericault 1822-La Monomane de l’envie literally transformed this proverb into a painting.
In the end, envy makes us fragile, extremely fragile.
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