How do you cope with envy?

Question

Recently I've been researching chinese streamers where even average looking (outright fat when the filter/effect breaks and you can clearly see it) girls thanks to app magic filters and being friendly/seductive and talking to lonely men can earn FAANG or higher level salaries.This made me re-think my time invested in my daily job vs the salary and quality of life it can afford me.I am trying to convince myself that having a decent IT job is much better than prostituting yourself on internet. But honestly I dont even consider it prostitution when they just cleverly take advantage of those stupid men selling them an illusion.

lhorie · Accepted Answer

Personally, I couldn't care less what random people on the internet are doing to earn money.Your particular fascination seems like a classic case of grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side. If you're envious, why not just try doing what they do? I mean that literally. Try to make a living out of content creation, cranking hours of footage with a smile on your face day in and day out. If it goes well, you'll make your money and won't care what others think of that lifestyle. Worst case, you might just realize that that life is not necessarily just glamour and easy money.

PaulHoule · Answer

This book describes a scenario for falling in love with somebody by transforming feelings of envy into feelings of admiration:
https://www.amazon.com/Love-Lust-Psychoanalysis-Romantic-Emo...
Robert Greene in his Art of Seduction suggests you can get somebody else to fall in love with you via this scenario but I've applied it to myself and found it elicited strong emotions in me that I was able to transmit to other people. It also came apart just as Reik says it does once I read something that provoked envy that I rapidly attached to my object of infatuation and the infatuation shriveled up and blew away in about 48 hours, like the scene where the crust blows off "Pink" in The Wall after they shoot him up with anti-psychotic drugs.
Personally envy is the limiting factor of my reading program right now.

gostsamo · Answer

Remind yourself that this is observation bias. One in maybe 10000 prostitutes earns the FAANG salary money. If you are the one in ten thousand developers out there, you would be making much more than them without the stalking, abuse, and psychological damage of objectivising yourself.

sharemywin · Answer

I look at it like this for most things:I'm not the richest person in the world and I'm not the poorest person in the world. So, I'm like 99.999999% of the population somewhere in the middle.

GDC7 · Answer

For this particular instance:Your competition isn't women, it's men. Don't know if it's really a silver lining though.....if you are envious of onlyfans girls then wait until you see what Bezos makes in a minute.Or the lifesyle of the GCC sovreigns who have the only merit of being descendants of people who fought and won for some wasteland piece of desert which ended up being extremely precious because of oil.

GDC7 · Answer

use envy as a propellent for your struggle.
You gotta keep going so at least you'd be making it harder for other people to succeed.
Or at least marginally harder, you'd force them to work an hour more here and 15 minutes more there

How do you cope with envy?

Remind yourself that this is observation bias. One in maybe 10000 prostitutes earns the FAANG salary money. If you are the one in ten thousand developers out there, you would be making much more than them without the stalking, abuse, and psychological damage of objectivising yourself.

I look at it like this for most things:I'm not the richest person in the world and I'm not the poorest person in the world. So, I'm like 99.999999% of the population somewhere in the middle.

use envy as a propellent for your struggle.You gotta keep going so at least you'd be making it harder for other people to succeed.Or at least marginally harder, you'd force them to work an hour more here and 15 minutes more there

I look at it like this for most things:
I'm not the richest person in the world and I'm not the poorest person in the world. So, I'm like 99.999999% of the population somewhere in the middle.

use envy as a propellent for your struggle.
You gotta keep going so at least you'd be making it harder for other people to succeed.
Or at least marginally harder, you'd force them to work an hour more here and 15 minutes more there