Jealousy

Envy and jealousy

Jealousy is slightly different from envy as it involves a third party and is about loss. Envy is always about potential gain.

Envy and jealousy overlap in the scenario where another person is admired by everyone else for possessing something. This gives you a 'double whammie' as it means they are both giving someone else attention and also not giving you attention. You are envious of the attention that they are getting and jealous because you see them 'stealing' that attention from you.

Turning loss into hate

What is happening here goes something like this:

I have something or someone that is important to me.

Either (a) you take that away from me, or (b) I imagine you taking that away from me.

This makes you not only a thief, but a thief of something to which I have emotional attachment.

You have hurt me deeply and I hate you for this.

If you are a friend, then this also involves betrayal and I hate you even more.

Notice how we work hard to justify to ourselves that feeling jealous, an emotion we may consider to be generally undesirable, is in fact ok for us to feel in these 'special' cases.

Sometimes we even retrospectively create this emotion when something bad happens to other people, so we can say 'they deserved it'. Again, this is all about justifying to ourselves that we can feel bad about other people.

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Jealousy

Losing out to others

Envy and jealousy

Turning loss into hate

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