Keeping Up With The Joneses

What is it that defines what you think you should have? Personal wants, preferences, and desires are all built around your personality and model of thinking and feeling they say. Ego also plays a pivotal role. But at what point does admiration become envy, and why in some does it take that step over the fine line to jealousy? Sometimes then taking on an extra competitive edge, covered slightly in Who’s Got The Biggest… And of course, general conditioning can’t be overlooked. What you see and absorb throughout your life, and all the influences within that play a part really do help to create and nurture the desire aspect needed for it to become so ingrained, it becomes a way of life and as the mindset of the masses.

Consumerism and Social Status in particular have a leading role. To create the class system of separation and a desire to be something else, to help with that social pecking order we have. But first you need people to want that, to want to ‘Keep up with the Joneses’, and base what they think they want, on what someone else has or on what they appear to have or be. Not even knowing perhaps if that person too is trying to keep up with someone else and isn’t even being themselves. And it’s taken an even stranger turn, with jealousy and ego combining to create a rather psychologically unstable ‘admirer’ of what you are. Almost as if being ‘better than’ isn’t on the cards anymore, it seems to be turning into ‘existing instead of’. Where a Single White Female type ends up so detached from themselves, and so desperate to be something else, I guess they start hating and becoming obsessional over that which they covet. Revealing that ugly and hateful feelings can often be under the surface of what appears to be admiration.

But in order to get people to play the game of wanting more, or to be something else, you first need people to be aware of what they could be having, or doing, or wanting. Don’t get me wrong, I believe inspiration is a good thing, and looking at what others are or what they have is normal in my opinion, to understand what it is you actually want or to be. But is it perhaps that inspiration and reality are at quite opposite ends of the spectrum for some, and if you do not have a realistic attitude of ability or skillset, then I guess it leaves a rather wide gap for things like envy to rear its head in some people. And then spill over into jealousy and go on to cause all sorts different behaviours and thoughts based on either the delusion that gets mentally put in place, or the hatred of the reality that is understood. Either of those scenarios often seems to bring an awful lot of trouble with it.

But it has been encouraged for the longest time now, to sell products, lifestyles, dreams and ideas of what you think could be, conveniently often not factoring in what you already are, and often they are other people’s dreams and ideas. And for some that will be enough, looking to something else to give you all the ideas and lead you, and for someone else to tell you who to be and facilitate that. But sometimes I can’t help thinking it’s better to have your own ideas and dreams, and most of all, know who you are…

(c) K Wicks

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