When you are not at your best and deliver a suboptimal performance in any area of life or work, you would find that it makes certain people around you happy. These are the people who would want you to stay mediocre so as to feel good about themselves. I strongly believe that such people need empathy and not derision.

People who celebrate misfortunes of others are themselves misfortunate, for their happiness is linked to the people around them. In their worldview, success and happiness is a metric that depends on performance of other individuals.

Why do people behave like this?

This usually happens during the growing up years. A child in kindergarten is not concerned with marks. He/she is trying to make sense of the world around him/her and learning the basics of reading, writing and speaking. As the child starts learning and moves on to higher classes, the concept of performing well in an exam and securing good marks kicks in.

Getting good marks in school is linked to various factors like:

• Environment at home
• Environment at school
• Interest of the child
• Nutrition, exercise and general well being

If any of these ‘dials’ are not tuned to the right ‘frequency’, it reflects on the child’s marks.
The busy parents look at the marks as the final KPI and want the child to optimise on that KPI instead of working on the above factors. A quick fix to make the child focus on this KPI is ‘comparison’.

This leads to the beginning of an insecure individual who is taught that his/her happiness and worth depends on how much he/she scores in comparison with classmates, friends, next door neighbours and relatives. The focus has now shifted from being an inquisitive learner and a good human being, to a better rote learning machine and a calculator in comparison with the peers.

Now for the course of his/her life, the said individual will compare not only marks but physical health, stature, relationships etc with all individuals that comprise the peer group. And over a period of time this peer group will keep expanding – from a classroom of 50 people to a cohort of 2,00,000 people appearing for a competitive exam.

People need empathy

The individual in the above scenario is a byproduct of parenting practices and societal norms. He/she is not necessary evil, but due to unhelpful conditioning and a lack of a better moral compass, the individual has turned into a selfish automaton. This individual is likely to experience a lifetime of agony, restlessness, constant comparison, low self respect and immense self doubt.

In order to make up for these uncomfortable feelings, the individual would would think that what they lack is ‘productivity’ and would fall in the trap of trying to be more productive with their limited time, having a poor work life balance and consuming energy drinks to prolong their working hours.

Over a period of time, these ‘short term high but long term low’ practices would lead to the development of lifestyle diseases, hypertension, stress, obesity etc.

Therefore this individual that we might abhor is not evil but rather really unfortunate.

Some helpful ideas

This blogpost is a bit gloomy and the situation might not be as dark as I have ended up painting it. There are good steps being taken. Schools are consciously replacing marks with grades; value education and happiness is finding its rightful place in the curriculum. Mental health in children as well as adults is now being considered as essential and not an afterthought.

But right now we are in a transition phase where we are rejecting old unhelpful ideas and moving towards better ways of thinking. During this transition phase, if you come across an individual who gets happy when you fail and constantly compares themselves to you; forgive them in your mind and move on.

They have not matured yet. Once an individual matures, they realise that there is comfort in not seeking outside validation but in seeking personal satisfaction.

Maybe beneath that tough exterior is an insecure 8 year old kid who wants to score more marks than you so that they can go back home and tell their mum about it and get a chocolate bar in return.