“Your ego takes you away from the present moment. Imagine living your whole life thinking about the past and the future, and then realising at the end that all you ever had was the present moment – but you were too stuck in your head to fully engage your senses and enjoy the world around you. Here’s how you can identify when your ego kicks in…”
“There are different reasons why people bully, including wanting to dominate others and improve their social status, having low self-esteem and wanting to feel better about themselves, and lacking remorse or failing to recognize their behavior as a problem.”
Throwing shade is a slang term that means making subtle, indirect, or clever insults or criticisms about someone. It often involves being sly or sarcastic rather than outright rude, with the intent to demean or belittle someone in a subtle way.
“What’s so interesting is that we seem to intuitively understand that if we can get ourselves to believe something first, we’ll be more effective at getting others to believe it,” says William von Hippel, a psychologist at The University of Queensland, who co-authored the study. “So we process information in a biased fashion, we convince ourselves, and we convince others. The beauty is, those are the steps Trivers outlined—and they all lined up in one study.”
One study of just this concept found that nearly half of people surveyed would rather make $50,000 in a world where the average salary is $25,000 than make $100,000 in a world where the average is $200,000; that is, they prioritized making more relative to other people rather than having a higher overall income. As the saying goes, “If you and I are being chased by a bear, I don’t have to outrun the bear; I just have to outrun you.”
