Analysis Of How To Keep Jealousy And Envy From Ruining Your Life

Comparing ourselves to others is a natural, healthy way to gauge how we are doing in life. However, when we compare our everyday-lives to others only-positive-lives, it becomes unhealthy. As we go on social media, we need to remember to look at everything through a filter because people aren't quite as perfect as they seem. “I later discovered that the classmate who I thought landed a job at NPR was really just an intern. And Payton discovered her friend who landed a killer job after college only did so because her dad had a connection on staff”(Friedlander). I love taking pictures, so consequently I follow a lot of photographers on instagram. There is this one guy who always takes magnificent photos almost everyday and it's hard not to compare yourself to that. Just this last week he shared a photo where he missed this small, but impactful, setting and it ruined his picture with a great sunrise. I think that picture was one of my favorites because it reminded me that he isn't perfect, and in fact has difficulties like I do. Everyone can get in this rut of always comparing yourself to others. While the constant comparisons we are forced to endure through social media aren't a huge deal for some, they can be the pushing or breaking point for someone already struggling with mild depression. Social media is only a part of the now very modernized world we live

Freitas, Donna. “The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost”. Oxford University Press, 2016. Ebook.

Social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) offers infinite connections and the ability to express oneself to the world. But are these connections and images of self-based upon fact or fiction? Through selective self-presentation, people often present the “ideal self” instead of the “actual self” in the online environment to achieve the feeling of positive self-esteem. In “The Way We Live Now: I Tweet, Therefore I Am”, Peggy Orenstein writes of how her Twitter posts reflected an idealized version of her life. Two studies support the hypothesis that such editing can have a positive effect on personal self-esteem. “Mirror, Mirror on my Facebook Wall: Effects of Exposure to Facebook on Self-Esteem” by Amy Gonzales presents a study demonstrating

When scrolling through your Instagram feed or watching Snapchat stories of classmates and friends, it can be very difficult and sometimes impossible to not feel jealous or discouraged. These days, teens post nearly every aspect of their lives on social media. You see everything from what someone ate for breakfast, what workout they did that day, to what cute new outfit they have on for their fancy family dinner that night. A wide range of pressures arises with social media usage. Teens feel they always need to be available, many gain reassurance from likes and shares, and they are faced with the struggle of keeping up with the constant image of a “perfect life”. This is very dangerous because many teens are experiencing discomfort in their own skin when they compare themselves to others. It is difficult not to judge yourself and others when you are constantly viewing what your classmates, friends, and celebrities are doing. When interviewing a friend, Brayden Xilas who has been personally impacted by social media, she said “There has become an unspoken competition for teens to prove they have the best life through social media”. Friends and classmates are constantly trying to “one up” each other which causes a lot of stress for people to always be doing something worthy of sharing on social media.

“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that intimidation is suicide…” (Emerson 370). A Separate Peace, written by John Knowles, takes place at Devon, a preparatory school in New Hampshire, during the 1940’s. Gene Forrester is a student at Devon and drives much of the story’s plot through his intimidation of his best friend Finny. A Separate Peace not only shows how Gene’s envy and intimidation of Finny affected him and his friendship with Finny, but it also shows Gene’s failure in achieving true peace.

Friendships are like those fragile glass ornaments that come out for Christmas. They’re beautiful, until someone does something to damage it. Gene and Finny’s friendship is the same. Its great, until Gene’s mind comes along to ruin it. His jealousy gets in the way of him being able to appreciate Finny’s friendliness towards him.

Jealousy, it is one of the most complex human emotions. Everyone experiences jealousy, but each person reacts upon it differently. In A Separate Peace by John Knowles, Gene is envious toward his lifelong friend Finny. The article “Jealousy: Love’s Destroyer” by Hara Marano, jealousy is perceived as a survival instrument. The video “Ode to Envy” by Parul Sehgal, jealousy can be seen as natural. All three sources identify how each person acts differently in a situation that revolves around envy. In the novel A Separate Piece, by John Knowles, the article “Jealousy: Love’s Destroyer”, by Hara Estroff Marano, and the video “Ode to Envy”, by Parul Sehgal, each author shows that jealousy causes each individual to react differently.

"The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel."(Alexa) The more you compare yourself to others, the more you will be negatively effected. An experiment conducted by Science Direct measured womens moods after browsing through social media for ten minutes. The scientists found social media use can put women in a more negative mood where they make more appearance comparisons, making them want to change their face, hair and skin. "According

Jealousy is a life trait in all humans and even in all types of animals. People always connect jealousy with the feeling of envy, to want some object, characteristic, or person that others have. It is only but natural to have the sense of envy and jealousy. These emotions can be active in everyday life ranging from stories to real life. Jealousy, given its negative connotation, is always portrayed as an adverse outcome. Hedding this information, not always will being jealous cause poor outcomes. Being jealous or envious can cause both superb and traumatic results. Examples could be if person one were zealously jealous of another’s achievements person one may possibly strive to beat the other. An example of an adverse outcome is as such; person one is jealous that another gets something person one can’t so they, therefore, destroy the one thing that they cannot have. Jealousy is a complex, over wavering gut reaction that can change what someone person would do and think about. When coming down to the roots of jealousy, it can boil down to a more terrible situation than that of good ones. Such as in “The Lady or the Tiger”, all of the decision making can also demonstrate the realism of human jealousy.

Dr. Rachna Jain, a social marketer, says in her article, 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Your Relationships, “people can become so seduced by the ease of connecting with others online that we begin to think that these relationships are more intense, more committed, and more complete than they really are.” Misallocating the priority of real-life relationships on to online ones causes people to hinder their opportunities to make actual relationships of substance. Another effect of being too invested in social media is that we compare ourselves to others too much. With all of the different platforms available on social media, we are able to see very much into other people’s lives, or rather the part of their lives that they want to share which may or may not be doctored. These fake impressions of having perfect lives and always being happy cause people to compare the things that they don’t have to the things that others do and the things that they do have to the things that others have better versions of. Also, knowing that people are watching us all of the time, there is pressure to uphold a specific persona so that we can be the type of person who people

Everyone has a sense of self. This idea of self is how a person maps out who they are in the world, but one way a person can develop a sense of self is by making social comparisons. Social comparisons are when a person defines their sense of worth based on how they compare with others. They base these comparisons on things such as looks, social status, and abilities.

Research completed by Gardner, Gabriel, and Hochschild (2002) reveals that when the target for comparison is part is self-construed, it leads the successes of the individual to become a cause for celebration rather than a cost to self-esteem. The current research was based on the theory of self-evaluation in which an individual gains self-esteem when they outperform others and lose self-esteem when they are outperformed. The research from the study shows that we, as humans, are not always greedy and wish to outshine our in-group. Pleasure in successes can be achieved even when we include our friends in our self-views.

When a person first thinks of murder, envy probably is not their second thought, but it should be their third. Statistically speaking, jealousy ranks number three in the most common motives for manslaughter. So although it may seem like a simple enough emotion, many feelings coincide. To most, it is a stressful and unwanted inner conflict that can cause or further aggravate thoughts of insecurity and inadequacy. Also, apparently, violence-inducing rage.

In order to understand the effect that social media has on self-esteem, we need to understand the construct of self-esteem. According to Coopersmith’s definition, self-esteem is “the evaluation which the individual makes and customarily maintains with regard to himself: it expresses an attitude of approval and indicates the extent to which an individual believes himself to be capable, significant, successful and worthy. In short, self-esteem is a personal judgment of the worthiness that is expressed in the attitudes the individual holds towards himself.” (p. 4–5) To put it more simply, self-esteem is the attitude that people have toward their own values.

Envy is a feeling that has been around the society for a long time; therefore, it has been discussed by religions and psychologist throughout the history. “For where envying and strife [is], there [is]