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Jealousy is a negative, regressive state of mind. The jealous thought is “I want what you have, and thus until I have it, you shouldn’t have it either.”
Why are people so jealous of successful people?
I can hazard some guesses on this.
1. We have been brought up to believe that this is the land of opportunity and that everyone in the United States can raise themselves up by the bootstraps. Only......in the past few years we have learned that the game is rigged. That those with money and power (and the corresponding influence over politicians that those things bring) is king. That those in big business and those in politics are one in the same, and that they switch roles regularly. That they don't care about the people who vote them in, they lie with impunity, they are getting rich through their lies and connections. When you continually see those in power breaking the law and financially benefiting because of unethical behavior you become angry and jealous. You also stop believing in the American ideal we were all raised to believe in, and when you stop believing you become angry and jealous.
2. It's easier to be jealous of the money and power of others, than it is to work and strive for your own success.
3. When you're working harder and longer just to stay in place it makes you angry. When you feel that the game is rigged against you, that government is placing more and more restrictions on you and making it harder to earn a decent living, when you continually live in fear that your increasingly tenuous grip on your life will fall apart it makes you fearful. Which manifests itself in anger at those (with all the power and money) calling the shots from their privileged "ivory towers".
4. You were raised to believe that the good guys always won out, and that when the bad guys screwed you over it would eventually come back to bite them in the a$$. And then you grow up, and realize that the good guys don't always finish first. That bad guys (over and over) seem to come out on top.
5. You try to do the right thing and plan for retirement, and then one day you wake up, turn on the TV and learn that the entire financial system of the world is about to collapse because of the greed and illegal actions of millionaires on Wall Street. You hear about CEO's who get paid $250 million to have their contracts bought out because of their ineffectual leadership. You see the government bailing out large companies with your tax dollars after the CEO's flew on their private jets to Washington to beg for money. You see the feds tossing money at green energy companies and then learn that after the companies inevitably go belly up the CEO's made millions on the deals. And in the meantime your 401K is worth half of what it was five years ago, your house in underwater, you haven't been on a vacation in three years, and you have to delay retirement for 10 years.
6. The propaganda we have been fed for the past few years is beginning to worm its way into the collective psyche of the American people. Pay a little more. Spread the wealth around. Pay their fair share. Tax the rich. Can afford to pay a little bit more. All phrases we never heard just a few years ago - which feels like a lifetime ago. We have become a nation of haves and have-nots that has been reinforced by the government propaganda. Say it enough times and it becomes true.
7. There will always be self-involved, shallow people who simply feel jealous of what other people have, and are too lazy to work and get it for themselves.
There's a bunch of other reasons why people feel angry, jealous, feel disinfranchesed, hopeless, helpless. Those are some of them.
The jealous thought is “I want what you have, and thus until I have it, you shouldn’t have it either.”
Why are people so jealous of successful people? Especially people who don't want to do what it takes to become successful.
This is an easy answer, but no one will believe it. The last few generations have been told from a very young age that everyone is a winner and there is no reason why you can't have everything you want. The problem is that they didn't bother to teach these same people that for every winner there must be a loser and more importantly no one bothered to teach them that the only way to become successful was to actually work at it.
So what happens is you get a whole bunch of people all standing around waiting to become successful or "winners" and then getting angry when nothing happens.
Success doesn't mean wealth, by the way. Well I guess it could if money is your god.
That's most Americans god. Which is why I asked the question.
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