Firstly, ask yourself what is an emotion. Well, according to Wikipedia, an emotion is a mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings, thoughts, and behavior. For example, anger, compassion, disappointment, frustration, jealousy, pride, love and regret etc. These are the more common emotions. I feel that there are “beneficial” and “harmful” emotions. “Beneficial” emotions includes compassion, guilt, happiness, hope, joy, love and surprise, these emotions help to make our life more colourful and full of meaning. “Harmful” emotions makes us see our lives as dull, and the make us feel that life has no meaning, such as anger, contempt, frustration, hatred, hostility, loathing and jealously.
Hence, I feel that jealously is the root of all “harmful” emotions. Being jealous may lead you to having other “harmful” emotions towards others and hatred between each other will be common. Therefore, I wish to eliminate jealously and people around the world can live in peace.
For example, student x is jealous as student y for winning him in an exam.
Student x will be jealous of student y and he will start saying nasty remarks about student y. This will lead both students to be very hostile to each other, and it is not a win-win situation. Both students quality of work would eventually drop and will result in both of them having a lousy grade. However, if student x is humble enough to ask for help from student y, student x’s quality of work would increase, both of them eventually will excel in their work. Since there is no jealousy, student y would be very happy that he managed to help a student score the same marks as him. This is definitely a win-win situation. Hence, from this simple example, jealousy harms others while it has no benefit to you at all.
Why shouldn’t other emotions be eliminated? Sadness is essential for us as we need to overcome failures and downs of life, guilt is also essential as it represents that we have understood our mistakes and not repeat them again. With boredom, comes enjoyment, with worry, comes happiness. Disappointment spurs us on further too.
A world with no jealousy would also see a decrease in other “harmful” emotions. The world would be friendly, more peaceful and joyful instead of having a world full of spite, revenge and hatred.
Please share your viewpoints on this issue.
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Dear Shi Jie,
ReplyDeleteI fully agree with you. Nevertheless, I would like to eliminate another emotion, that is disappointment. I'm always overwhelmed with disappointment every time something doesn't go my way or when I feel that I have done badly in an exam. Now, why do I want this emotion to vanish from the face of earth? I think that disappointment only serves to cloud our lives with negative thoughts and hence we'll be filled with sadness every day and our lifes would have no meaning. Instead, we should try to be positive daily. For exmaple, you failed your Maths test but you improved tremendously in your Chinese test. In this circumstances, I would choose to be glad and relieved that my Chinese test improved, I will not care so much about the disastrous maths test. However, disappointment will set in inevitably and it would like 'rain your parade' and make your feel that your MSG is over for the term and one maths result is going to cause you harshly.
Therefore, we should eliminate disappointment from the world as we should look on the bright side and not let disappointment take control of us in every 'wrong' thing we so.