I teach my kids to seek out high skill, high paying jobs and not look down on anyone. But even that is not a solution.

Jealousy and envy are not the same thing, although the nuance is subtle. What you're talking about is closer to envy. You can be envious of something or someone without the hostility that turns it into jealousy.

Everyone loves Nietche but no one is actually living Nietche. Sure it's a useful tool if you stop, analyze this emotion and built from it but how many people are actually capable of this in practice? Instead people just get captured by the emotion and never progress.

I don't think pop culture will ever view jealousy as a positive emotion until we collectively learn emotions.

Seeing what someone else has and taking that as information to then decide what you want is not jealousy. Jealousy is seeing what someone else has and hating them for it. It deserves a bad rap.

You’re talking about ambition, or something else.

If you consider the monarchies it came from, this was a big improvement. To even open up the possibility of someone “getting theirs” without any birthright to it was a revelation in its time. But now we’re ready for the next thing.

The crab will legit only escape and live if it gets enough other crabs under it to reach the rim of the bucket. I guess you’re saying people act like that even when they don’t need to?

Recently a big game developer announced the end of development on a long running game. They announced they’re doing one more major release and that’s it. When people saw what’s coming in the last release there was a lot of excitement because they were delivering a lot of things people had asked for.

Some said “awesome!”

Some said “you mean they could have done all this at any time and didn’t?!!”

It’s like when you share some information with someone and they immediately say “why disnt you tell me!!”

Some people’s glass will always be half empty no matter what.

Lots of people get degrees in lower-earning fields because they value working on things that are interesting or meaningful to them more than they value the income tradeoff. Growing as a person is its own reward.