Two Attitudes That Steal Our Joy and Destroy Our Happiness

As a newspaper reporter fresh out of journalism school, I frequently had to work weekends. My friends, who worked five days a week and earned more than I did, lounged by the pool.

They wanted me to hang out with them, but I usually had a news event to cover or a person to interview. I loved newspaper work, and I burned and freckled when I was in the sun, but I still felt sorry for myself.

Why didn’t I earn more money? Why couldn’t I lounge by the pool? I was missing all the fun!

One especially grueling week with a dozen news stories flying at me from every direction, I complained to my roommate, “I’ll stay single the rest of my life because I never have time to meet anybody. I can’t even sit by the pool.”

She said, “I think it’s time for a pity party.”

“A what?”

“A pity party. Feel sorry for yourself for ten minutes, but after that, time’s up. You can’t feel sorry for yourself anymore.”

I’ve thought about the pity party a lot since that day. If we could all relegate an attitude of self-pity to ten minutes, then get on with our lives, we might be a lot better off. Feeling sorry for myself because my work schedule seemed unfair seems trivial now compared to circumstances I’ve been through since then.

Self-pity stems from our erroneous expectation that life will be fair. But life doesn’t have to be fair for us to find opportunity and hope. By refusing to give in to self-pity, we’re able to forge ahead, making strides toward our goals and experiencing joy even when life throws us a curve ball.

Self Pity and Envy go Hand in Hand

Another problem with self-pity is that it goes hand in hand with its debilitating cousin, envy. When we start believing life isn’t treating us right, we start envying those we perceive as having more, being better, or getting the break we somehow think we deserve.

I had the hardest time not being envious of my sister-in-law when she was named Woman of the Year. She was featured in a magazine and came all the way to Atlanta to receive her reward at a big, elegant banquet at the Ritz Carlton. Naturally, since I lived in Atlanta, I was expected to attend the awards ceremony.

But her award wasn’t the only thing that made me envious. She was beautiful, she earned a lot of money, and she had published a book. Book publishing was supposed to be my domain! She had never even aspired to be a writer!

I had worked years and years to write, only to have my submissions repeatedly rejected. I was so disappointed at receiving daily rejection notices that I rented a post office box, giving me more control over when I saw the negative news.

At the time of my sister-in-law’s awards ceremony, my life consisted of ferrying kids to and from soccer practice, changing diapers, scraping pizza off the floor and dealing with a mounting pile of rejection letters. It took a monumental effort for me to attend the ceremony and watch my sister-in-law, beautiful, successful, and poised, glide across the stage to receive her award.

But self-pity and envy were repudiations of everything I believed in. Indulging those emotions was like complaining, “I don’t have enough of my own blessings and abilities. I deserve more, so I’ll envy yours.”

Yet if we feel sorry for ourselves and are envious, how do we stamp out those emotions?

Solutions to Negative Emotions

Gratitude is one antidote. It’s hard to be envious of another person’s achievements when you feel blessed and grateful. The two emotions are incompatible.

When I put things in perspective, I thought about how my sister-in-law had struggled as a single mother, been laid off from her job, suffered numerous financial setbacks and worked hard to get where she was. She deserved the award!

Nobody forced me to be a stay-at-home mom with three kids. It was a choice. And I’m glad now I made that choice. Despite feeling overwhelmed by motherhood and disappointed over writing failures, I view those years as a valuable and treasured part of my journey; a time that enriched and deepened me.

There’s no valid reason to be envious of others, because we’re all on different journeys. We don’t know what other people have been through to get where they are. We aren’t privy to the struggles they’ve endured or the things they’ve given up. Achieving what they achieved or acquiring what they possess might not be the key to our own happiness.

Happiness seems to spring from our own inner resources and attitudes rather than from a single moment of accomplishment.

One surprising thing I’ve discovered is that I derive more joy from the journey than from the destination. When I reach a goal I’ve worked for, there’s a fleeting sense of accomplishment. If I sell an article to major publication, I immediately start thinking of what I’m going to work on next. Then it’s on to the next goal.

But when a morning sky is a cloudless canvas and a family of bluebirds flocks round my feeder, I feel a surge of joy. Experiencing gratitude and joy in those precious day-to-day moments is incompatible with envy and self-pit

Living our journey with gratitude rather than comparing ourselves to others frees us to be our own best self.

“If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” Desiderata

Because we’re human, we can’t always control our emotions and make ourselves feel grateful. But there’s a solution. The way to counter negative emotions that threaten to derail our best intentions is to accept them, acknowledge them, and refuse to act on them. We might not be able to control our emotions, but we can control our actions.

By going to my sister-in-law’s awards ceremony and cheering her on, I was refusing to act on envy. I could have stayed home and pouted, or made up an excuse, but I decided to outwardly support her victory. And the funny thing is, when I outwardly supported her, I began to feel happy and truly supportive!

I started thinking about the positives. Her banquet gave me an opportunity to get out of the house and have a dinner at the Ritz Carlton. And I didn’t even have to do anything to earn it! At the end of the day, I was glad to return to my three kids instead of to my sister-in-law’s career. How could I envy her life if I didn’t want all the other stuff that went along with it?

Now when I’m tempted to give in to self-pity or envy, I give myself a five-minute pity part. Then I count my blessings and get on with my journey. When I view each day with wide-eyed wonder and expectation, there’s no room to think about what anybody else is doing. There are too many joys and opportunities to explore along my own path.