What causes jealousy?

[Will]

I think jealousy comes in when you think someone is better than you and you can't do much about it. I was jealous in high school when some of my friends got into better colleges than me even though I was working fairly hard. I felt like they were just plain smarter and better than me. I knew jealousy was a sin so I would try to fight the feelings. However, now 3 years later, I don't really care if my friends are going to be more educated and succesful than me. They may be happier than me too, but for some reason I just don't care anymore. Actually the Bible says weakness can be good. It says that the weak in spirit are blessed in Matthew 5:3 and it says that Christ's power is made perfect in Paul's weakness in 2 Corinthians 12:9. Also, somehow sufferings and disadvantages and rip offs can somehow make me feel the opposite of guilty sometimes. Also, they can be fun for some reason because maybe I enjoy coming up with creative and genius solutions to them and I enjoy the challenge. I am like 3 soon to be 4 years behind my friends academically and have some mental illnesses and leaky gut syndrome and my holistic medicine provider just found black mold in my system which she says is as serious as cancer. I get bummed out sometimes, but not that often. I am pretty optimistic that these things will clear up and if they don't and all I can do in life is blow leaves and mow lawns then I'll get by. If you're jealous, you can always pray with faith and seeking God with your heart, and this can help. It has helped me. You can do this with any sin. Another idea I came up with on how to fight jealousy is that if you are jealous, than you can outdo the people you are jealous of somehow. This is just an idea though, I mean then your friends might be jealous of you and you may end up killing yourselves or making your lives miserable trying to outdo each other. So in the end, I would say the jealousy is worse than actually being worse than someone at something sometimes.

This coincidentally appeared in the news on my homepage a couple days ago and is pertanent to your question:

http://news.discovery.com/tech/facebook-...lousy.html