Why We Can't Be Happy For Others
There's one feeling that's common between a child and an adult. As you grow older, it only gets worse. We should have learned to handle it in childhood but we never do. And that's being happy for others. It's almost impossible to feel genuine happiness for someone else. Especially when things aren't going great for you.
But even when things are going well, it's hard to be happy for others. Because then you measure their condition against yours. If yours is still relatively better, you can afford to be happy for them. But if it isn't, you burn with envy. Religion has a ready answer for this conundrum: force yourself to be happy for others, and god will take care of you. It's a subtle fear mechanism designed to reprogram your thinking.
Behavioural economics tells us that happiness is almost entirely relative. We are, by nature, status-seeking creatures. If you aren't progressing at the same pace as your peers, you feel like you're falling behind in life, even when you're doing perfectly fine in absolute terms. The trajectory has to be comparable to theirs, and if possible, better, for you to feel any real satisfaction.
This incessant need to outperform others makes you hyper-aware of everything going wrong in your life and far less attentive to everything going right. Gratitude helps, but it doesn't hold a candle against envy that deeply ingrained. If you simply compared your current condition to where you once were, you would find genuine reasons to feel proud of how far you've come.
We rarely do that, because we're habituated to measuring ourselves against our peers. The better approach is to define where you ought to be at this stage of your life and measure how close you are to that place. That's the only goalpost worth chasing.
Everyone has their own life to navigate, their own trajectory to steer. You have your own path. You make your own way. When you compare yours with theirs, you are essentially discounting the weight of your background, your cognitive strengths, your resilience and your limitations, all because someone else appears to be living the life you think you deserve.
We struggle to be happy for others because we have no clear sense of what we actually want. We see others finding joy in their pursuits and assume that chasing the same things will bring us the same happiness. So we chase. Until one day we realise it never gave us what we were looking for. It only made us more miserable.
Think long and hard about what you want in life. Where you came from and where you are headed. And root for the good people around you. Life, after all, is not a zero-sum game. Two people can both succeed. You don't have to lose for someone else to win.