To further elaborate my point I found an article about why we criticize other people.
You probably love to criticize other people because you were criticized a lot as a young person.
You criticize people to feel better about yourself
The second most frequent reason why people criticize others is to feel better about themselves. If someone’s success or personality is too shiny, it’s easy to throw dirt at it, and the shininess instantly loses its brightness. At least a little bit; in our eyes. What a relief. Not.
It’s been statistically proven that we are very indulgent towards ourselves and much harsher and judging towards others. We have double standards to protect our egos.
If somebody is better in something important to us or owns something we want or outruns us in a competition, we must quickly find all the reasons why they aren’t as good as they appear; otherwise we feel humiliated.
You criticize other people because you envy them
Criticizing others to feel better about yourself and criticizing out of envy are closely connected motives. They are a slightly different tones of the same voice. Let me explain.
It’s in our genes to hate unfairness. And when somebody gets something we want in a very unfair way, or when we feel life was unfair to us and kind to others, brutally strong feelings of envy arise.
Examples of situations that usually make us envious, because life is unfair:
- A friend gets lucky and earns much more money, much more easily than we do
- A parent shows more attention to a sibling than to us
- A coworker gets promoted, but we obviously deserve the promotion more
- A colleague is talented and doesn’t have to work so hard to be good at a certain sport
- We offer much better support to our kids than we had, but it seems they don’t appreciate it
- We can find many similar situations
All these situations are very unfair. Well, life can be extremely unfair sometimes and that hurts. We protect ourselves with many different rationalization mechanisms. We protect ourselves with self‑delusion.
“Sour grapes” and “sweet lemons” are two very frequent rationalization mechanisms. With self-deception, you make things that you want but don’t have less desirable (sour grapes) and things that you do have but are not that important to you more desirable (sweet lemons).
Criticizing others is absolutely a way to make grapes less sweet – to make other people’s accomplishments less worthy, to make relationships less important, and what other people have irrelevant.
In a way, we could say that criticizing others is often an easy way to express frustrations and other negative emotions. But criticizing other people or complaining won’t help. Only a superior life strategy and going into action to improve your life will.
Edited by Grumpydwarf24 - 7 months ago
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