Envy

Thus Spake Zarathustra-Friedrich Nietzsche

“Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche is one of my favorite writers and philosophers. His take on life is great and all his philosophy is based on bettering oneself, but what I found most curious about his work is definitely his take on envy. He states that society has made us feel ashamed of envy, which is a feeling natural to humans, and that this is wrong. He states that we should embrace envy as it reveals the deepest desires of our souls and that by listening and analyzing envy we can understand what is it that we really want in life.

I really like this because I think we can all relate to it, we can all remember a time when we felt bad that someone close to us had some sort of achievement as it made us feel less of ourselves, It reminded us of the achievements we have yet to complete or to even attempt to.

I think that for a more fulfilling life we should all think like Nietzsche, we should see envy as a description of our desires, as something beneficial and use this feeling to remind us to take action to achieve the goals that will take us to that place that our ¨souls¨ aspire to be at, while understanding that is ok to feel good for a friend that progressed in life and that this does not describe ours.