Don’t pass the J

Shakti Shetty
Shaktian Space
Published in
2 min readSep 15, 2018
Who the heck are we to judge others, particularly when there is nothing but goodness gracious in front of you? [Photo by Daniel Jensen on Unsplash]

Envy isn’t for everyone. It’s part of our culture nowadays to suggest that we are jealous of each other’s features or achievements. When a person says “I am envious of your job” it’s supposed to be taken as a compliment by the other person. There’s no digging here; snorting the surface with words only. How are you doing? I am doing great. The questioner doesn’t want to know and the answerer doesn’t want to reveal. A bin-bin situation. The basket case of modern conversations where words are mere objects to be thrown around for the sake of filling in for the silence. In other words, maintaining the much-needed calm in the room.

But if we were to pause and wonder what exactly do we mean when we say certain things, we might be startled by what we might find. For instance, when you say that you’re jealous of the fact that your colleague has something that you don’t, you are being sweet. You aren’t repressing the darkness inside of you. On the contrary, you are merely saying something that you feel is worth saying without actually mulling over it. Not a lot of feelings, just words. However, if you are really bothered by an idea that your colleague proposed to your boss which you think you were fully capable of coming up but for some insane reason couldn’t, then you might be in trouble. During such situations, you are already too deep in to yourself to even care what you might find in there. You are envious. Not a lot of words, just feelings. But once you’re over it, you might claim that being jealous makes you competitive. Which in effect, makes you a better person.

Wait. It doesn’t.

Envy, either expressed via words or silence is never a good friend. It provides us momentary highs about trumping over our so-called rivals. When in truth, our only rival is us, ourselves. The ones we’re busy competing against are screensavers to hide our desktop full of flaws. A lazy form of distraction. When we club ourselves with a few individuals in an organization and mistake them for the world, we are doing an enormous disservice to the person we could have been. Our immediate goal should have been a better person than we were a week or a month or a year ago or so. But no, being the idiots that we are, chose to fight it out for remnants of appreciation. Unfortunately, being cut-throat is celebrated in the corporate world, despite realizing very well that growth is a byproduct of cooperation, not insecurity—the very feeling that you experienced when your boss liked your colleague’s idea more.

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Shakti Shetty
Shaktian Space

I am a Mangalore-based copywriter and a wannabe (published) writer and I blog randomly about not-so-random topics to stay insane.