Why is it sometimes hard to be happy for the success of others

Why is it sometimes hard to be happy for the success of others

     If you don’t trust yourself, what could you trust? In order to trust someone else you would have to trust your judgment of them… there’s no way around it, you can’t bypass yourself out of life, although sadly that doesn’t mean we can’t try.
     Trust or confidence is an estimation of an obstacle overcome, which enables us to estimate obstacles ahead of us and know that we can overcome something at least as hard or maybe harder.
     When weightlifting it is unwise to try and lift more than about 10 pounds more than the heaviest thing you have lifted. Our muscles might be able to do it because they can grow quickly, but our tendons which don’t have direct blood flow might not be able to handle it, not to mention limitations in our ability to balance a much higher weight than we are used to might get us into trouble and the weight might fall on us. There is no exact number, but I think if you can lift something ten times, then you can go up in weight ten pounds and be safe. Relationships are the same, both with other people and ourselves, we can look back at what we have overcome and take courage that we can overcome each time a little bit more. The excitement can grow as we look for obstacles to test ourselves rather than look out for obstacles to avoid them.
     Just as we have to trust ourselves to be able to trust other people, we have to love ourselves in order to love other people. To love someone, not only do we have to figure out what love is, but what what a person is. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t being myself…” what does that mean? Why is it that we can be embarrassed of ourselves? “I didn’t mean to say that…” When we say “I” what are we referring to?
     Do you identify with your emotions, or do they just seem to hit fully formed out of nowhere making us have to choose to follow them or not?
     The fact that we can choose to follow our emotions or not, that means that they can’t be us, or at least not the part of us that has final say.
     Do you identify with your thoughts, or can you step back and spectate them while they chatter and calculate leaving you the choice to pick and choose which conclusions to believe or react to?
The fact that the two main parts of us are parts we can just observe or even ignore, means that we are likely neither, and that if we find them useful, we can set up a relationship between them. It’s like sitting between two conveyor belts, and random things passing by, one full of things that possibly could be meaningful and the other that possible could be logical, and we can calmly watch as each item passes by and choose to take it if we want and use it, then put it back on if we decide to find something better.
     This analogy gets even crazier. We don’t even have to stay sitting there between the conveyor belt of our heart and the conveyor belt of our mind, we can get up and walk around the factory. When we do that, we will find that everything on the heart conveyor belt is not actually coming from the heart nor is everything from the mind conveyor belt coming from the mind. Our heart’s job is to identify things of value and ways to support them. Our mind’s job is to figure out how to logically carry out what the heart wants to do. Both our heart and our mind look outwards at the world, and result in us taking an action. Somehow, in opposition to our natural process we are tempted to merely prove something instead of actually do it. We are tempted to lie or pretend so that people think we have done or are doing something we are not. That doesn’t make sense to the heart because it is not meaningful, and it doesn’t make sense to the mind because it is not logical either.
     Our heart when it sees value, adds to it and as a consequence feels joy. Our mind when it applies logic feels peace. Somehow we can trick our heart or mind into producing the feeling of joy similar to a person tricking their body into thinking they are having sex with someone else and having an orgasm. Just as there is physical, there is mind and heart onanism as well, which I will call ego. Instead of interacting with an actual person, we can interact with the concept of them in our mind.
Like playing with a dollhouse, we can interact with dolls of people instead of the real thing, and since our mind can only perceive someone through its interpretation of the five senses which are grossly inadequate at best to comprehend the infinite nature of a person. Our mind doesn’t notice the difference of a concept build on an impoverished interpretation of the five senses and a purely imagined one.
     Our heart and mind perceive different things about life, our mind, the logical reality of matter, and the heart the meaningful potential of hope and love. Our mind measures and has words to describe the finite borders and measurable nature of a thing. Our heart sees the infinite and have no words or measurements to describe what it perceives through feeling. It can only be expressed through non-verbal communication, through body language, physical touch and art. The heart uses something other than the five senses to perceive the world, but that doesn’t stop the mind for trying to make the heart corroborate what it feels with what the mind perceives with the five senses. This process is complicated by the fact that since the mind controls the interpretation of the five senses, the anticipation of something and the perception of it are both equally the same sort of electrical signal in the same sort of places in the brain. If we don’t do something to counter for it, about ninety-percent of our experience will be what we anticipate. This means that whatever small sample of perception we take will then keep cycling in our brain as ninety percent of our experience. Kind of like a feedback loop on a microphone by a speaker getting louder and louder until the speaker breaks. We can see that happening when one smirk or smile, or insult or compliment ruminates in our mind until it dominates our thoughts and feelings.
     Suffice it to say our doll house and the dolls in it can get pretty far from the real things. We can imagine more or less value in a concept of someone regardless of the real them, and feel a sensation from the heart that is close enough to love that if we are distracted enough we can think it is the real thing. Since there is nothing stopping us from making a concept of ourselves in our mind, we can build it up too, and feel that same sensation in the heart. I will call this, self-esteem, which is a sudden increase in our perceived market price.
     The world esteem comes from the root “money” and it has become quite the commodity in society, because the actual joy and peace that comes from self-confidence take so much work and often take time, we can do pretty much nothing and produce self-esteem which in the moment feels almost the same.
     To make matters worse, most if not all of us were raised to respond to pulls on our self-esteem. “I’m proud of you,” our parents praise when we do something convenient to them, and “I’m disappointed,” they say when we do something inconvenient. This emotional push and pull distracts us from actually seeing things of value with our heart, because things we do from the heart more often than not get us in trouble... whereas just doing what someone else tells us to usually seems to work to please them, and when they are pleased we get a self-esteem boast of praise.
     When we allow ourselves to be dependent on self-esteem we are putting others or circumstance in the driver’s seat of our life, because we can’t force someone to praise us… or can we? We might not be able to force the actual them to praise us, but we can force the imaginary version of them in our head... which essentially feels the same.
     When we get caught up in the self-esteem game we are either doing things we don’t see objective value in just so that we can get praise from others, or we are twisting concepts of ourselves and others in our mind in order to make us look better than others. There is a formula that produces a puff of self-esteem, and that is when we can compare the concept of ourselves to the concept of someone else and conclude we are better, that we are the greater value. This is why we tear other people down even sometimes on accident, because when someone does something good, when we compare our concept of us our concept of them, we lose.
     Imagine that you build a business and make a lot of money, and then everyone around you makes businesses that make more money. Even if you make the same amount of money, and even if everyone benefited from all the new products and services, somehow there is still a feeling of discouragement that can creep up. This happens because we are looking inward about what the relative difference in success says about us and our market value and not looking outward at the things and people themselves.
     For example, if someone got an electric car just to be unique, they would be sad to see other electric cars on the road, whereas if someone bought an electric car because they genuinely want to drive it, they would be happy to see other electric cars on the road because it would mean there would likely be more charging stations being put up that they could use because of the increase in people who would use them
     Just as there is self-confidence and self-esteem, there is also relationship-confidence and relationship-esteem. If our significant other comes home after doing something hard that they are proud of, if we are dependent on our feeling of self-esteem, then their success feels like a relative failure for us, because if we stayed the same and they moved forward, they are winning and we are losing, or they are building the momentum to win and we are going to lose. When really, if we focus on self and relationship-confidence instead of esteem, when our significant other comes home after doing something hard that they are proud of, that means that the team is capable of doing harder things, and since you are part of that team, you are capable of doing harder things together. That’s the whole point of a team, to synergistically do more together.
    Love is hoping the best, it is unconditional, because why would you hope for anything but the best for everything? Trust is a conditional investment, based on confidence. Trust leads to investment. Esteem is perceived market value, which can lead to investment, but since it is not real, because if it was it would be trust, in the long run it will fail. It’s the difference between a fad and a real product. Yes, with manipulative enough marketing you can sell people junk, but why not put that same effort into just making something that isn’t junk, something that sells itself because it is so good?
    Self-esteem is a poignant feeling that hits with a suddenness that is very exciting, but it’s something we can rely on because praise that makes us feel good and motivates us could have been given just to manipulate us. Since it is not always or purely the case that esteem happens for false motives, it is not evil, it’s just irrelevant, it is just not something we can rely on. We should focus on what creates self or relationship-confidence, and if that also happens to produce esteem, great, and if not, it doesn’t matter. Confidence is not as poignant as esteem because esteem hits with a suddenness from something as simple as praise or even just perceived praise. Confidence however, is the byproduct of looking back objectively at what we have overcome and what that means about future obstacles. It doesn’t have suddenness because we have to dig up those memories, and it isn’t going to make us feel zero-to-hero, it is going to give us about ten percent more courage. It’s nice to suddenly feel like you can fly, but it’s not very practical because either you will realize right before you take the leap that you can’t, or you will take the leap and fall tragically.
     We can either excited imagine greater obstacles we can overcome, or anxiously try to produce the fleeting feeling of esteem. In a relationship we could address the elephant in the room and try to tackle it, knowing that as much as it might hurt that we will be better for it, not just because the elephant will be gone, but because we will be confident that we can handle bigger ones. Or, we can distract ourselves from the elephant in the room and go on a fun date and feel the rush of esteem that comes from feeling like you have a functional relationship. The same goes for our relationship with ourselves, we can address the elephant in our own room, or distract us with things that produces esteem.
     When we rely on esteem, we look back and the biggest hardships in life with fear about what they say about us and our perceived market value or our about relationship and its perceived market value, but when we make confidence our focus, we look back on our biggest hardships with courage that we can do as hard or harder things.