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How to Stop Being Jealous of Someone Else’s Success

Jealousy is inevitable. But are you affected by it negatively? Understanding how to stop being jealous can help you control your own life and live better.

Jealousy is an emotion that’s as natural as falling in love or finding someone attractive.

While jealously is at times inevitable, it should never be turned into an obsession.

All of us feel jealous at some time or the other.

As long as it’s a passing thought that doesn’t torment you, you have nothing to worry about.

But if it’s something that controls how you feel, and comes in the way of your everyday life, you really need to find a way to stop being jealous and control the emotion before it overpowers your life.

[Read: How to deal with jealousy in a relationship]

What is jealousy?

Have you ever felt upset for no reason at all when a friend achieves something you’ve always wanted?

If someone else’s happiness or achievements bother you, even when it has nothing to do with you, you’re probably experiencing jealousy.

At work or in the classrooms, we’ve had to deal with people who have always had better fortune while you were given the short end of the stick.

While it’s alright to get upset about someone else’s success that leads to your loss, the emotion of anger or failure shouldn’t show up along with jealousy.

How to stop being jealous

Jealousy will never help you. You may feel jealous of a friend for hooking up with a gorgeous arm candy or because they got promoted. But how is that jealousy ever going to change anything in your own life?

You could ponder over it or spend hours every day plotting revenge or hating someone because they are better than you or luckier than you. But you’re only wasting your own life, while this person who is the object of your jealousy wouldn’t even give you a thought.

At the end of the day, jealousy won’t help you and it definitely won’t leave you in a better place.

Some people are gifted with better abilities, and some people work hard.

And all said and done, dedication and passion can help you achieve the same thing too. [Read: How to be perfect in everything you do]

On the other hand, jealousy will blind you and force you to spend hours fantasizing about circumstances that’ll never materialize. You’re still going to be the same person you are now even after whiling away hours or days in jealous thoughts and ideas.

Ways to stop being jealous of someone else

If you feel like you’re obsessed with someone else’s success or failures, there’s a good chance that you’re jealous.

Use these ways to stop being jealous and divert all the negative energy into something positive that can ultimately help you lead a better life.

#1 Don’t live in a world of comparisons. In this world where everyone’s lives are open for all to see through social networks, it’s easy to constantly compare yourself with your peers and competitors.

While healthy competition is a good sign, blatant jealousy isn’t. If you want to be successful in life, be your own competition. Compare your own past and try to get better every single day. It’ll help you become the best you can be without falling prey to petty jealousy. [Read: How to be successful in life]

#2 Your achievements matter. Celebrate your own achievements, however small they may be. Rome wasn’t built in a day. You can’t hate someone else because they’re famous or earning a lot more than you are. At some point, they were in the same place as you.

Life isn’t easy. But with serious effort and dedication, you can achieve your own dreams. Base your happiness on your own achievements and not someone else’s achievements, or you’ll find yourself angry and bitter all the time.

#3 Be passionate about your life. Love yourself and respect your own life. If you’re not happy, choose a new career path that you love. When you respect yourself, you won’t get jealous anymore. You may be envious, but not jealous because you believe in your own capabilities. If someone else is better than you, it’s a reason to envy them and work harder, not become jealous and wish them ill. [Read: Tips to love and respect yourself]

#4 Ask yourself the truth. Why does it bother you if some other person achieves something better than you? There are so many people in the world. Why are you associating all your jealousy and triumphs with just this one person? Aren’t you being small minded and stagnated by worrying over petty fights when there’s a whole world of opportunities out there?

#5 The world is unfair. Deal with it. Some people have better lives and better opportunities. What are you going to do about it? You can’t do a thing other than create your own successes. Fantasizing about your jealousy will take you nowhere. You know that already, don’t you?

#6 Stop wishing you were someone else. You’re not. And you will not become someone else with wishful thinking. Unless you consciously work towards achieving more, you’ll spend the rest of your life bitter and fragile because your happiness doesn’t come from your own success, but from watching someone else’s downfall. [Read: I don’t know what to do with my life]

#7 Everyone has their highs and lows. Life isn’t always perfect. While you may be jealous of someone, there may be many other areas where you have a better life. Be realistic and see the truth as it is. All of us fail some and we win some. When you realize that you have a great life too, you’ll be able to stop being jealous all the time.

#8 Don’t lose your life. When you focus on jealousy, you’re losing your own real life because you’re too busy thinking about someone else’s glories or happy moments. You could hate someone else because they’re prettier or get more attention, but what you don’t realize is that your life has stagnated and nothing will ever change unless you do something about your own flaws and shortcomings.

#9 Be positive. Be confident and pursue your own dreams. Jealousy is a way of accepting failure. Why are you jealous? Don’t you think you are capable of achieving the same pleasures as the object of your jealousy some day? Jealousy is your mind’s subconscious way of giving up and whining about how unfair life is. Don’t succumb to it. Instead, go out there and prove that you’re better. [Read: How to be nice and loved by all]

#10 Jealousy comes from fear. What are you afraid of? Almost always, jealousy stems from a deep fear that you may never achieve the same thing. The more you’re jealous, the more you’re convincing yourself that you’ll be no good. Unless you do something about it, you’ll spend the rest of your life feeling bitter and hateful. Turn that jealousy into determination, without ever giving up and you’ll definitely stop being jealous all the time. [Read: Are you secretly jealous of your ex?]

A tiny amount of jealousy is acceptable. But if it you feel like your jealousy is slipping out of control, understand what jealousy really is and how it’ll cripple your life from the inside. [Read: How to change your life for the better and be happy in 12 steps]

And when you’re ready, use these 10 tips on how to stop being jealous of someone else’s success. It can make a world of a difference to your life once you realize just how useless jealousy is, and how bitter it can make you feel all the time.

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The Coming of Kidults

I found myself rooting for this book as I went through the early pages. But about one-third through Consumed, I began thinking “repetitious,” then tried to convince myself that it had a nice “range,” but eventually had to admit that it was a rambling reflection best described as a promising article buried in an overblown book.

Benjamin Barber is a political theorist (perhaps a would-be cultural anthropologist) who teaches at the University of Maryland. He can turn a phrase: “The young are big spenders way before they are even modest earners.” Again: “The needy are without income and the well-heeled are without needs.” Still again: “Manufacturing needs rather than goods is a primary task of consumer capitalism.”

Barber is convinced that “many of our primary business, educational and governmental institutions are consciously and purposefully engaged in infantilization.” As a result, “we are vulnerable to such associated practices as privatization and branding.” By infantilization, he means “induced childishness.”

In his view, privatization is an ideology—“a fresh and vigorous expression of traditional laissez-faire philosophy that favors free markets over government regulation and associates liberty with personal choice of the kind possessed by consumers.” Privatization reverses the road to maturation, he says.

By branding, he means “commercial identity.” “Lifestyles are branded and brands stand in for lifestyles which take the place of character of the kind that once was the marker of identity. Every brand has its demographic so that companies...try not only to attract a particular tranche [portion] of consumers but to persuade them that the good life for them must be defined by wearing or eating or using the brand in question.”

Once “production-focused” on manufacturing products, our economy is now “consumer-focused” and much concerned with creating brands, not to mention the need to possess those brands. Whereas the system in days gone by produced goods and services to meet real needs, and whereas advertising simply provided information to bring need and the corresponding product or service together, now the system creates the need in the mind of the consumer, and advertising has to persuade consumers that their identity depends on connection to the branded product or service. In order “to figure out ‘who you are’ you must decide where (and for what) you shop.” That, says Barber, “is modern branding’s simple secret.”

The author takes his reader down a long and rambling road “through branded wants and manufactured desires.” That road traverses “creative capitalism,” “investment capitalism,” “liberal capitalism” and “managerial capitalism” before arriving at—you guessed it—“consumer capitalism,” which is where we are today. It is supported by an ethic of infantilization in much the same way as the Protestant ethic was seen (by Max Weber and others) as supporting the robust and rugged spirit of production-oriented capitalism generations ago.

Readers of Barber’s other work will not be surprised to discover that he looks to democracy to rescue capitalism, “by serving real rather than faux needs, by providing services to those who are not yet consumers rather than those addicted to consumption.” He sees this as “civic consumer” resistance.

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