The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

is to have parents without much parental feeling.
Without having an unduly favoured brother or
sister, a child may perceive that the children in
other families are more loved by their mother and
father than he is. This will cause him to hate the
other children and his own parents, and when he
grows up he will feel himself an Ishmael. Some
kinds of happiness are everyone’s natural
birthright, and to be deprived of them is almost
inevitably to become warped and embittered.
But the envious man may say: ‘What is the good of
telling me that the cure for envy is happiness? I
cannot find happiness while I continue to feel envy,
and you tell me that I cannot cease to be envious
until I find happiness.’ But real life is never so
logical as this. Merely to realise the causes of
one’s own envious feelings is to take a long step
towards curing them. The habit of thinking in terms
of comparisons is a fatal one. When anything
pleasant occurs it should be enjoyed to the fun,
without stopping to think that it is not so pleasant
as something else that may possibly be happening