Brains and Personality

I caught myself reacting with annoyance and, truth, some envy at a picture in the paper of some 40s something woman who was being promoted to a position of prominence in a major local company. She was laughing gaily, completely on top of the world. My reaction made me wonder whether the Thoreau quote shouldn't be about "the great mass of men [people] lead lives of quiet [seething with resentment.]"

Then I remembered a story told by one of my MBA profs, a kind of a joke.

"You see, there were these two worms in a shovelful of manure headed for the flower bed. Anyway, on the way, one of them drops off and falls between the cracks in the sidewalk. Over the next few months the one in the flower bed gets regular feedings, of well, you know, cow shit; and one day, all fat and happy, sets out for a walk. He's just coming by the crack in the sidewalk when this skinny, scrawny, bedraggled worm finds its way out of the crack."

"The sleek denizen of the flower bed says 'what happened to you?' and hears the sad tale of his shovelmate's travails. Then the scrawny one says, 'how did you...?' At which point his fellow puffs himself up and announces, 'Brains and personality!'"

Make of that what you will, but my read is that an awful lot of what happens to us in this life is pretty random. It is almost as if each of us is one instance in a cosmic experiment to see what turns out how given an infinitely variable set of inputs. And without getting into the politics of income disparity it is clear that some of the experiments get more loaded for success.

So back to my petty resentments. What I have to recognize is that for each instance that I might have that button pushed, there have to be tens, dozens, maybe hundreds of instances when my life and my station in it could have been the stimulus for someone else's resentment. Maybe my only issue with it is that I didn't get the promotion and visibility.

Alright, this is feeling pretty scuzzy. Envy isn't very pretty from any angle. Maybe the better place to be looking is at how I carry my own sense of entitlement around.