Ask HN: How do you cope with envy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you cope with envy?

2 pointsmathverse10 comments

Recently I've been researching chinese streamers where even average looking (outright fat when the filter/effect breaks and you can clearly see it) girls thanks to app magic filters and being friendly/seductive and talking to lonely men can earn FAANG or higher level salaries.

This made me re-think my time invested in my daily job vs the salary and quality of life it can afford me.

I am trying to convince myself that having a decent IT job is much better than prostituting yourself on internet. But honestly I dont even consider it prostitution when they just cleverly take advantage of those stupid men selling them an illusion.

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Personally, I couldn't care less what random people on the internet are doing to earn money.

Your particular fascination seems like a classic case of grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side. If you're envious, why not just try doing what they do? I mean that literally. Try to make a living out of content creation, cranking hours of footage with a smile on your face day in and day out. If it goes well, you'll make your money and won't care what others think of that lifestyle. Worst case, you might just realize that that life is not necessarily just glamour and easy money.

This book describes a scenario for falling in love with somebody by transforming feelings of envy into feelings of admiration:

https://www.amazon.com/Love-Lust-Psychoanalysis-Romantic-Emo...

Robert Greene in his Art of Seduction suggests you can get somebody else to fall in love with you via this scenario but I've applied it to myself and found it elicited strong emotions in me that I was able to transmit to other people. It also came apart just as Reik says it does once I read something that provoked envy that I rapidly attached to my object of infatuation and the infatuation shriveled up and blew away in about 48 hours, like the scene where the crust blows off "Pink" in The Wall after they shoot him up with anti-psychotic drugs.

Personally envy is the limiting factor of my reading program right now.

Are you talking about falling in love with someone because you transform envy into admiration for them? Or is this about a strategy how to make them falling in love with you by making them feel strong emotions of admiration from them for you?

Whether it happens spontaneously or is engineered love is best when it is mutual.

Suppose there is somebody who has turned their back on their past and their own values. If you can be the person who is doing what they secretly want to do they first are going to feel a bit envious, hostile, and threatened. This can later metamorphize into feelings of love.

Assuming you've picked the right "victim" for you, you are also going to find the subject is something that appeals to you and engages you emotionally. Assuming that happens you are going to transmit strong feelings, for the other person every encounter you have might seem like a scene from a movie because of this and it has a powerful effect. (e.g. the ideal person to seduce has the characteristics to seduce you.)

I developed a great deal of influence over that person but when my infatuation popped I wound up using that influence to prosecute a domestic gripe which is about as anti-seductive as it gets and that person panicked and ran off.

The Robert Greene book has a good explanation of how to operationalize this.

Remind yourself that this is observation bias. One in maybe 10000 prostitutes earns the FAANG salary money. If you are the one in ten thousand developers out there, you would be making much more than them without the stalking, abuse, and psychological damage of objectivising yourself.

This is not my observation though. I have been thoroughly researching this topic and collecting data. I did setup a bot that collects data from hundreds of profiles that stream every day and they all seem to be doing very well. Avg earnings is $150k.

I look at it like this for most things:

I'm not the richest person in the world and I'm not the poorest person in the world. So, I'm like 99.999999% of the population somewhere in the middle.

For this particular instance:

Your competition isn't women, it's men. Don't know if it's really a silver lining though.....if you are envious of onlyfans girls then wait until you see what Bezos makes in a minute.

Or the lifesyle of the GCC sovreigns who have the only merit of being descendants of people who fought and won for some wasteland piece of desert which ended up being extremely precious because of oil.

Well It's much harder to compare myself to Jeff Bezos than it is to your average looking woman in her 30s right?

Of course I am not a woman and therefore I cant participate in the same market but it still makes you think a lot about your life when those people can pull in a lot of $$$ without much work.

OnlyFans is a bit special because it's pornography.

use envy as a propellent for your struggle.

You gotta keep going so at least you'd be making it harder for other people to succeed.

Or at least marginally harder, you'd force them to work an hour more here and 15 minutes more there

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