Jealousy, Redux

My observation a few weeks ago that jealousy appears long before praise (the other girls will detest you for your beauty even if you can't score a prom date) was true. But my explanation was unnecessarily convoluted.

Jealousy arrives long before acclamation because the world is not set up to acclaim. Unless you're a competitive swimmer or office-leading linoleum salesman, don't expect medals or certificates, or even kind words. Praise comes only to those with little use for it, the monkey-see/monkey-do machine having identified them as praisees, a positioning with little to do with talent or other tangible bona fides.

Jealousy is much more tightly pinned to bona fides. The jealous scan their perimeters 24/7, with sublime sensitivity and hair trigger responsiveness. They notice early, along with the paranoid and the manipulative. Those with a vested stake in spotting exceptionality stand alertly ready to slash away.

And that's the world’s only scanning system. Most people are not wired to detect (much less celebrate) the exceptional, because it’s all about them. Fully occupied with their own fantasies of exceptionality, they are your competitors in the marketplace for recognition. When actual talent does get spotlit, it's a bank shot. Acclaim happens despite talent, not because of it, as an outgassing of tribal flocking hormonal magnetism, normally kindled via cynical tactics.

Your neighbor's German shephard barks though you never considered breaking in. He parses your innate threat before you imagine yourself in such terms. To the barking German shephard, you seem a formidable foe, even though your friends barely suppress yawns.


It was ghastly to be envied, even by old friends, for my seeming Chowhound success while I struggled to pay bills and devoted 16 hours per day, 365 days per year, to repelling online psychos and shills alone in my claustrophobic apartment endlessly awaiting download of gigantic log files because I couldn't afford broadband (full tale told here).

I desperately needed someone to feed me a doughnut or to take me for a walk and reassure me that I deserved my share of the world's sunlight and oxygen, but most everyone assumed I'd ascended to some rarified position, wanting for nothing, and I was hated for it. I have not recovered from this.