Only the right environment can teach us to use our instinctively negative attributes positively
Opinion from the Internet on using envy, empathy to progress, succeed:
Wouldn’t empathy be the answer instead? I woke up thinking this because doesn’t envy lead to too many negative feelings? Negative feelings are not what we want to cultivate or encourage, right? Evolution-wise.
Can advancing empathy mean doing away with or negating envy?
I understand envy and how that can foster competitiveness though.
What about dismissive-ness and condescension? At various times people with these attitudes have pushed me to learn more, figure out stuff I never realized I could, and win arguments.
Too much negativity, as what happens when one feels envy, can be exhausting and lead to people to head down the wrong paths?
You are right that envy, jealousy are usually negative attributes, emotions.
As a result we either want to pull others back, trip them, so we don’t have to be envious of their success, or we want to be better than them so we can overcome them and prove our superiority while if possible even humiliating them at the same time.
I didn’t mean envy in such a way.
In a unique, purposeful, methodically organized, conducted environment we can use the instinctive envy to get inspiration, driving fuel to get out of the comfort zone and try to be like the others making us jealous. But not in a negative way, but in order to mutually complement, drive the whole environment towards our common goal through teamwork.
And empathy is definitely something that can help us.
The problem is that by default we are not really capable of true empathy, which means feeling others as they themselves feel themselves. By default we are all closed into our own, inherently egocentric, subjective perception, calculations.
Thus again we need the same, special environment where we can learn, practice true empathy, until we become capable of seeing reality through the desires, thoughts and viewpoints of others.
With the right method we can channel, use all our instinctively negative, selfish reactions, attributes towards positive, constructive common goals, purpose.