$$ FOR NOTHIN', CHICKS FOR FREE
Jun 1, 2006 12:00 PM, Kylee Swenson Remix Editor
This issue got me thinking about money. Hmm, where would that idea come from? Maybe it could be all the tailor-made suits and insane superluxury cars, yachts, $30,000 watches, 32-carat canary-yellow diamonds, etc. Some of these producers are so high-paid, the next big purchase they're thinking of is a fourth house or a $200,000 car for a girlfriend.
I'm not poor: I eat when I'm hungry, pay rent when it's due and have money leftover for parking tickets and bar tabs. I also live in a very expensive city, San Francisco, but I make do just fine. Still, while 18-year-old actors are buying their first $4 million home in the Hollywood Hills, I've been saving up since my first babysitting job at age 12 for a one-bedroom condo. Again, I chose San Francisco, and I'm glad I did. But being an editor at a magazine where the people featured in it have better music gear than me, more accomplishments and more expensive shoes sometimes turns me a little green. Does anyone else out there feel a tinge of jealousy for people who have it better? Do you burn both ends of the candle day-in and day-out trying to balance day job and music job for a pittance of reward while other people seem to spend all their free time in the hot tub?
There are different levels of covetous desire. There's rivalry, which is almost healthy in a sense; competition can make you achieve more. There are local bands that sometimes get bigger breaks than my band, and I'm like, “Ah man. What are we doing wrong?” And then sometimes we get the breaks, and we celebrate. Then there's envy, which is the resentful awareness that someone else has something you want. There's also jealousy, a more hostile and obsessive version of envy. Obviously, those feelings are not remotely good for you because they make it impossible for you to enjoy or appreciate what you are or what you have accomplished.
I did a little research about jealousy to see how to stamp it out. After all, isn't life too short to spend it wishing you were someone else? There are a couple bits of advice that stood out from my brief search. One was, “Separate the facts from the stories.” You can spend all your time thinking about how much better someone else has it, but you don't really know. Sure, by the looks of things, so-and-so has money, beauty and fame. But that doesn't mean that person has awesome friends or supportive parents (and those are assets, too). It doesn't help to make up fiction about a celebrity in order to make you feel worse about your own reality.
Another bit of advice I read was, “Whether you believe that you can do something or not, you're right.” Go ahead and talk yourself out of succeeding at something. What good will that do? Well, it will ensure that you'll never succeed. Scott Storch (one of the jealousy-inducing success stories in this issue) makes a very good point. He said, “People have a hard time thinking of themselves as successful.” Storch did envision himself that way in the future, and now he's beyond successful. So if you start thinking of yourself as an improved version of yourself rather than wasting time thinking about who has it better than you, then maybe you can actually get somewhere rather than spinning your jealous wheels.
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