Crab mentality - crabs in a bucket
You may fear achieving success on your terms because of what other people will think of you as you awkwardly fail on your way to the self-identified destination. You may also fear taking action to achieve what you want because you fear getting your desires, and not knowing what to do and how to behave. You may fear becoming conscious of success, or failure.
Both fears can be equally powerful. Humans often do everything in our unconscious power to prevent ourselves from achieving our desires. The journey to achieving something usually requires a transformation of some kind. And transformation equals change, in our minds. Change feels frightening, to varying degrees depending on your mix of personality traits and learned conditions. Not the same kind of frightening you experience when you suddenly see a cobra in front of you as you walk the forest. It's a subtle, mind-consuming type of frightening that burns slow and steady like the firepit your grandparents would make during winter.
So, we do everything in our power to obstacle ourselves in the achievement of success as we define it, and we may not even know it.
We get stuck in our ways of doing things, ways of believing stories, and the circumstances shaped by the people with whom we establish relationships early on. This can all become an utter trap that you don’t even realize. It is okay if you are content with your current situation, which is often a great mindset to have in order to surrender to the flow of life and live with tranquillity.
But if you strive for something better in your conceptualization of things (which is very common in the current generations of humans more than in the past due to multiple factors that I am not listing here), then your limiting beliefs and stuckness will make you feel like a slave—and you may not be able to exactly pinpoint slave to whom.
In truth, it seems clear that decisions are not right or wrong by themselves, but you can make them right or wrong in retrospect through the actions you take and the stories you craft. Everything will depend on your mind—the stories you tell yourself. So, if you can manage to train your mind like you’d train your body through sport, you can improve your situation by reducing the weight of cognitive distortions and limiting beliefs you manufacture for yourself as you go through existence.
You can become the kind of person who takes action and gets things done, instead of dreaming about an ideal state without ever trying.
At that point, you may encounter another seemingly big challenge.
A friend once told me he was catching crabs on a beach in Thailand at low tide. He would get one crab at a time and place them in a bucket he would carry by his side. As he looked inside the bucket, he noticed that whenever a crab tried to crawl out of the bucket, the others would instinctively pull it down, back into the bucket with them.
That strikes me as very similar to what happens with humans—and there is a term for that: crab mentality. Once you can start taking action and reducing the paralyzing impact of your limiting beliefs to a minimum, the additional layer of barrier you may encounter are the people around you, who can’t fully psychologically handle the envy stemming from seeing someone else close enough to them raise out of the bucket and into “success”.
At that point, consider changing the people you have around, for most of the time in your life. I understand we are social creatures and we deeply need human connections with others and all of that. At the same time, it truly seems important to me that the crab mentality doesn’t affect you in your journey out of the bucket. The journey itself can be psychologically challenging, and if the other crabs pull you down, it will be incredibly hard, if not vain. Maybe not for you, and you can decide this for yourself. But for most people most of the time, that is a fact, because you naturally want to be liked by the people you know (and also the ones you don’t know?), though I am aware there are individual variations in the intensity of such instinct.
So, you may feel the intense pressure to conform stemming from the subtle envy and corresponding behaviors of people around you.
Be aware of doing the same with other people. Other people are not that different from you. We feel envy sometimes—and that’s a natural feeling, don’t resist it—toward the people who are close enough to us that we could see ourselves achieving their same status, but we know we haven’t, so we may experience a wish for being in their position, or a wish to pull them down back to our level so we can regain our relative status back. Consider noticing these human urges and taking them as a sign that you can take action to achieve your desires, or opt out of the desires treadmill completely.
You have other things to focus on; go on with your life and stop thinking about others. At the same time, you don’t want to think about yourself all the time. That can become an endless spiral of thoughts too.
You are enough and so is your life, at the very core of things. Oh, and don't forget: you are an atom in the universe; a tiny particle of life that won't last long. Consider stopping believing you deserve things; the very concept of deserving is a story in your twisted mind.
“If you get into a relative mindset, you’re always going to hate people who do better than you, you’re always going to be jealous or envious of them.
They’ll sense those feelings when you try and do business with them. When you try and do business with somebody, if you have any bad thoughts or judgments about them, they will feel it.
Humans are wired to feel what the other person deep down inside feels. You have to get out of a relative mindset.”
