“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
- Carrie Fisher
Many of you reading this are probably already feeling an aversion to the
topic—none of us likes to admit that other people are better looking
than we are or, even worse, that we resent them for it. In fact, many of
us don’t admit it, not even to ourselves. Instead, we channel the
jealousy into resentment and let it lurk inside of us until the object
of it does something that we can interpret maliciously—and then we hate
them for that reason. I was inspired to write this post when I got a
tearful phone call from a law school friend about how women at her new
job don’t like her.
Our lady does well at her job and people think that she has special relation with her boss because she is a woman. Another of her friend got an intership at US and people went so far as to gossip that she has channels in the White house :-)
So, when we resent people this is what we do. We attribute their success to certain things. Yes, I do not refuse that beauty gets things done. But there are smart women too. If you start attributing all the success to a certain genetic factor and start discounting the person's abilities, talents and hard work, that is very wrong. You're simply fooling yourself and I don't know how long one can go on fooling one's self. I do understand that people come in with innate abilities and what takes 8 hours for you may take 2 hours for someone else and it causes frustration. These incidents make you lose your self worth (not really though). Since most of us are quite immature it affects us. This much difference in abilities affects us. We should either be smart enough to place ourself in a place where we fare reasonably well. If the talent pool is so diverse that the difference between me and the best is 10 fold and unbridgeable, I am bound to suffer depression. But, it's wrong to turn it into resentment. Handling depression alone itself is horrific, to hate someone else is even more horrific. But I don't know if that resentment and wrong reasoning totally help us believe in the lie in the first place and continue feeling proud about ourselves. Maybe it's a protection mechanism. I don't know.
But, I write this without much clarity but I write because this is an important topic to brood.
Our lady does well at her job and people think that she has special relation with her boss because she is a woman. Another of her friend got an intership at US and people went so far as to gossip that she has channels in the White house :-)
So, when we resent people this is what we do. We attribute their success to certain things. Yes, I do not refuse that beauty gets things done. But there are smart women too. If you start attributing all the success to a certain genetic factor and start discounting the person's abilities, talents and hard work, that is very wrong. You're simply fooling yourself and I don't know how long one can go on fooling one's self. I do understand that people come in with innate abilities and what takes 8 hours for you may take 2 hours for someone else and it causes frustration. These incidents make you lose your self worth (not really though). Since most of us are quite immature it affects us. This much difference in abilities affects us. We should either be smart enough to place ourself in a place where we fare reasonably well. If the talent pool is so diverse that the difference between me and the best is 10 fold and unbridgeable, I am bound to suffer depression. But, it's wrong to turn it into resentment. Handling depression alone itself is horrific, to hate someone else is even more horrific. But I don't know if that resentment and wrong reasoning totally help us believe in the lie in the first place and continue feeling proud about ourselves. Maybe it's a protection mechanism. I don't know.
But, I write this without much clarity but I write because this is an important topic to brood.
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