Is It All Just Envy?

Recently, I saw a familiar scenario at a popular news channel. A poor family was being interviewed about their state of poverty in life. The father of the family said it all. He said "We are so poor, we live from day to day. We have seven children. We don't have jobs. I say the government is to blame for all this. It's those corrupt public officials stealing from the people!"

Hmmm. Come to think of it. He sure is right on the reality of corrupt public officials perverting the government coffers. However, he didn't get it all right.

You can't always put the blame on other people for your miseries. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, you can't always point a finger at the snake. You have to realize your own mistakes eventually.

Like in the interview above, the poor man can't blame others for him having seven children inspite of his self-professed state of poverty. Really. I mean it's no secret that it seems the poorer a family is, the more children they usually have. The more affluent a family though, the less children they'll usually have. There's obviously something not right with this reality. It should be the other way around, yes?

Is it all just envy? I mean think of it:  was the poor man in the interview just miserable because he sees other people more well-off, having more material goods than him and his family?

Or put it this way:  what if we were all as poor as the man himself? Would he still consider himself and his family poor and miserable? Most probably not. Hmmm, quite something to think about huh.

Let's turn it around. What if we were all equally rich? There'll be no millionaires or billionaires to compare ourselves to, no "keeping up with the Joneses", no person or family to be envious of.

What if people all over the world were blind? What do you think would occur? Would the blind man still pity himself? Would we still see blindness as a disability when it's the norm? Of course not . There is simply no comparison that can be made. Blindness will be considered normal. We will be like bats - a society of the blind. As the saying goes:  "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

It's all relative. See, situations or events are viewed as negative or positive depending on who or what we compare it to. It's based on relative comparison.

It's like that proverbial story about a man who stated "I complained about my lack of money to buy new shoes.... until I saw a man with no feet."