By Lizabeth Roemer, Ph.D., and Josh Bartok, M.S.

This past week, the Northern Lights were, unusually, visible in our area and throughout much of the United States. We went to every window in our home, out onto our deck, and looked from our driveway; we tried three cameras on several settings, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to see this glorious sight for ourselves. We were disappointed.

Later, as I (LR) scrolled through my social media feed, seeing beautiful image after beautiful image of ethereal neon colors in the sky, natural feelings of envy arose in me. I wished to have had that experience as my own. The beauty of the photographs felt like they were taunting me.

And then I saw a post of someone sharing that their 92-year-old neighbor had seen the Northern Lights for the first time in her life! Something else arose for me quite spontaneously: sympathetic joy. As this sympathetic joy arose, this joy-in-another’s-joy, I felt the constricting feelings of envy release and fade away as I imagined how joyful this stranger must have felt.

This changed how I was able to experience those glorious pictures on social media. While envy still arose at times, I was able to shift more easily into a sense of sympathetic joy for the joy that people were sharing. Instead of feeling outside the experience or sorry for myself, I felt connected to the awe of nature and this shared experience that so many people were having.

Our minds naturally fall into comparison, and so we can easily get caught in well-worn grooves of envy, comparative feelings of lack, for what others have that we don’t, or what we imagine they have that we imagine we would enjoy. When we are

© Psychology Today