A clear and common example of this is how we deal with the sting of jealousy we might feel when a colleague talks excitedly about his promotion while we ourselves are frustrated with not moving ahead in our own career. As we’ve already seen, we only feel envy towards people who are roughly equal to us in terms of status, so we needn’t feel surprised to find we can harbour such a negative emotion towards a co-worker. But we can, in the same breath, acknowledge that his success is fine. We have no control over our colleague’s professional life or the happiness he gleans from it. If we dwell
...more
