English
Knowing that your neighbour is going to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Lisbon, while you’ve never left the country, thinking of your sister, who is living in a warm country while you are almost freezing to death in winter, loving your best friend just a little less because she can eat as much as she wants without gaining weight while you spend the last 3 years fighting to lose just 4 kilos. How unhappy we are! Envy brings out the worst in people, because we always want what we cannot have. Being jealous means that sometimes we enjoy seeing other people go down.
“Envy shows people how miserable people feel and their constant paying attention to what others do or don’t shows just how bored they are” said the German philosopher Arthur Schoppenhaur. This quote perfectly explains the concept of envy. Instead of being jealous of that friend who just found a great job, it is better to feel happy and to try to do the same. To admire a person is to be able to value him and to be able to value yourself, too.
We are never satisfied, we always want more and more, and we rarely look at what we achieve within our limitations. A football match, for example, shows us a very positive type of envy between the two teams which contribute therefore to fair play. If you are an envious person, you only hurt yourself. You will really suffer thinking about the fact that no one pays attention to you or that you aren’t the centre of attention and that there’s always someone better than you. Don’t allow your frustration to dominate your life, because wearing yourself down just doesn’t make sense. It just isn’t worth it!
However, envy has many other bad characteristics, due to the fact that this deadly sin also means to enjoy seeing other people’s failure. In Dante´s Purgatory, the punishment for the envious is to have their eyes sewn shut with wire because they have gained sinful pleasure from seeing others brought low. The etymology of this term shows us that it’s related as well to the concept of “having an eye over something”. Well, take care that your uncontrolled instincts aren’t getting out of hand!
You surely have a lot of things which you are happy about without feeling any type of envy, haven’t you? If not, just make a wish! It isn’t always necessary to go far away for finding pleasure and entertainment: rent the best apartments in Lisbon, because they are really worth it.
