Trauma: Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You
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Why is Everyone's Life Better than Mine? | Trauma Ep. 9
Najwa Awad discusses the impacts of jealousy and resentment, especially with the culture of oversharing on social media, and some practical tips on how to overcome thoughts and emotions associated with it.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. As-salamu alaikum, Najwa Awad from Yaqeen Institute. Today we're going to be talking about the common question, why is everybody's life better than mine? Jealousy is one of the most difficult feelings a person can experience. It's this really heavy thing that you carry around with you but as much as you want to put it down, for some reason you can't. And jealousy could be about small things like, why does this person have a nicer car than me? Or why can't I make more money like this other person? Or jealousy can be about much bigger things like, how come, you know, why can't I get married? Why can I not have children but everybody around me is having three, four or five? Why do I have this really difficult, this lifelong illness? Why do I have cancer and everybody around me my age is healthy? Jealousy has been around since the beginning of time with Adam's sons, Habil and Kabil. But now we can say arguably that the fitan of jealousy might be more than it was before, especially with social media. Why? Because social media comes with us everywhere we go, with mobile devices, seeing the wonderful things that everybody has in their life. It literally follows us from the bedroom to work to our car. We're always on social media looking at how everybody's life is so wonderful and all the accomplishments that they have. Participating in a culture where we really overshare and enhance all of the good things that happen to us, it can really be a recipe for jealousy and for feeling bad about oneself. Because when we are looking at these small snippets of time where people are showing their best selves, we're not
seeing the struggles and the hardships that people have behind closed doors. And so we assume that what we're seeing is how things are. It also goes into the whole culture of instant gratification. We think that everything needs to happen immediately. So when you see someone's degree or someone's success on social media as well, then you also start to think, well, it's something I don't have. It's something I can never have because it's been put in such a positive light. And then it also starts to cause some feelings of resentment. Oh, this person, they just have all these accomplishments. How is it that they can do all these things and I can't? Again, because all of the hard work and the sweat and the tears that they put into whatever it is that they needed, whether it's a marriage or their education or their career, that all goes unseen. And it's very misleading. One of the other really negative things about social media is that real and raw emotions that are not all happy and fluffy and glittery are generally, they're not posted. And even when people post them, it's very frowned upon. If someone was to go on social media and say, oh, I'm so lonely, or I had the worst day, people are going to think, oh, this person wants drama, and you're almost shunned a little bit. So we have these platforms that are just showing all these negative things and excluding all the hardships that people face. And you don't have to be online to participate in the comparison game. Jealousy can happen all around us because people don't really live at home the way they exemplify themselves and the way they show themselves in the community. For example, you might be at a chalka and an uncle might say something about how his son is going to an Ivy League school, but he will never disclose that
his son has a drug problem. Or you might be out with a girlfriend and she talks about how her husband loves her so much and buys her all this jewelry, but she would never tell you about his infidelity. And that's because a lot of the things that are painful to us, we keep them behind closed doors and we don't disclose them to other people. And so these innocent deceptions, not necessarily on purpose, they might make us feel bad and jealous about things that aren't really there. When you feel like you're being pulled in by jealousy or thinking that everybody's life is better than yours, it's good to reflect on yourself in the equation, not looking to other people because it's not really about other people. It's about how you view yourself. When you don't feel good about yourself or your self-worth, then everyone around you seems to have a better life or better things going from them. And that's because you're really coming from from a deficit. You're not looking at your positive attributes and your accomplishments. This is an unhealthy way of thinking called disqualifying the positives. Think about it. If you really believed that Allah put you here on this earth for a reason, worshipping him, of course, but that he gave you unique attributes and strengths and things that nobody else has, how can you compare yourself to other people? Your life will never be exactly like anybody else's. And on top of that, how can we compare our blessings to other people's blessings? A blessing for me might be a fitna for someone else and vice versa. And we don't know the unseen. We don't know what a person has gone through and we don't know where their life is heading. So comparing what you have against what other people have will just leave you feeling miserable. Allah says, if you are grateful, I will surely give you more and more. One way to break out of the cycle of jealousy and thinking that everybody's life is better than
yours is to practice and cultivate gratitude. This is not only an Islamic concept, but in psychology, research shows that people who are grateful have higher levels of life satisfaction. It doesn't really matter how you practice gratefulness as long as you're doing it consistently. Research indicates that writing a letter to someone appreciating what they've done for you can make a big difference. Other strategies might be writing lists of things that you are grateful for. When you start to see the positives in your life, it helps you overlook some of the negatives. The grass is really greener wherever you water it. So when you start to take the time to really focus on yourself and build yourself up, you can take yourself places, unimaginable places, with the time that you would have been spent jealous on other people. Just investing in yourself 20-30 minutes a day would be hours a week and would be, you know, months over time. And this is time that you don't get back, that you can really transform yourself into being the unique version of yourself that you're meant to be. For more tools, insights, and reflections on the question, why is everybody's life better than mine? Please check out our series, Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You, on YoquinInstitute.org.
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