Toxic Friends Envy Your Success For These 3 Reasons
You invalidate all their Excuses
It’s one thing to be hated for being a thief, a bully, a bad driver, or a snitch, but to be hated for putting in the hard work and succeeding feels different.
Sometimes people don’t just want you to succeed. It’s a very unsettling thought, but it happens. Sometimes we want to dismiss it to ourselves that it isn’t happening.
Maybe that friend who suddenly became touchy when you delivered the good news about your promotion was just having a bad day. Who knows? But you’ll rather think he/she is happy for you.
But why does our success often make others uncomfortable? The general assumption is Envy. Well, while that may not be wrong, other things often make people wish others remain on the same level as them. Here are three of them.
1. You disrupt their perception of themselves
No one likes to think they are lesser than average, ever.
A study published in The Journal of Experimental Psychology shows that people consider that the moments of peak manifestations of their traits and abilities best capture who they are themselves, but that other people are better captured by their average performances.
Though present in all of us on different levels, the better-than-average effect disrupts our perception of ourselves. As a result of this — often inaccurate — perception of our abilities, we often get disappointed and sometimes anxious about our results both at work and in class. As research led by social psychologist Jason Plaks explains,
“People are driven to feel that they can predict and control their outcomes. So when their performance turns out to violate their predictions, this can be unnerving.”
We all love to have a sense of control over our lives. Instinctively, we don’t like unpredictability. We love to find confirmation that the things we believe about ourselves and the world around us are true. We find supporting evidence and push back on anything that disrupts our beliefs.
Here’s the thing: Whenever you succeed and others don’t, you become proof that there’s nothing really special about them. That their abilities might be worse than the next person’s. This makes them anxious and some might try to write off your success or outright deny to themselves that you are better than they are.
2. You invalidate their Excuses
We all have stories we tell ourselves about why we are where we are. They are pills we take to feel better whenever the hard reality of our mediocrity hits our minds.
When siblings or a group of friends, who grew up together under the same conditions are poor and miserable, it’s easy to be comfortable and find good excuses for why things are the way they are. After all, you all grew up under the same unfair conditions, that’s why you all are not succeeding at anything.
However, once one person from the group makes something of him/herself, no one has any excuse anymore. You become clear proof that their mediocrity isn’t justified; that the conditions are not the problem. And that is what makes people uncomfortable. Jordan Peterson put it perfectly in 12 Rules For Life,
“When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future. Then you disturb others, in the depths of their souls, where they understand that their cynicism and immobility are unjustifiable.”
It is not uncommon that when most people become successful, they also lose friends. This is because you might make them feel so uncomfortable that they begin to feel inferior, and they’ll do anything to hold on to their excuses for failure, rather than accepting their present inadequacy.
3. They only look at the small picture
In his Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene wrote,
“Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses… It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices.”
Human beings are by nature very reactive creatures. We naturally tend to focus on what’s happening now. Often, our emotions fluctuate, not based on what matters, but on what’s happening right in front of us.
Because of our reactive mode, we easily get carried away by the success people experience in one aspect of their lives.
Often, we only see and focus on the most apparent things like flashy cars, the fancy office, the luxurious apartment, etc. This is also what happens with social media.
Though it has become obvious that what people portray on their social pages are nowhere close to their reality, we haven’t stopped envying people because of it.
The big picture on the other hand is less appealing and also less obvious. It isn’t seen by being reactive; it is seen by being responsive. It takes empathy, selflessness, and understanding to always remember that we all have struggles. And that though someone else has a few wins today, there will always be hurdles here and there.
Though we live in a world of “highlight reels” where people now take what is thought of them as more important than how they live their lives, we can still look at the big picture of things. It’s not going to naturally happen when we see others get ahead of us; it has to be a conscious choice. As the British filmmaker and novelist, Wayne Gerard Trotman put it,
“Some people are silently struggling with burdens that would break our backs.”
Final words
Feeling that the success of others is unfair to you is something that can happen to anyone. It doesn’t make you a bad person. The most important thing is not to react to the emotion.
Respond with understanding and empathy. Consciously decide to see the collective struggle (of which we all have some) that binds us together. To recap, here are three reasons why people may be angry when you succeed.
- You distract their perception of themselves.
- You invalidate their excuses.
- They only look at the small picture.