From the author: The game “and others” is a kind of anesthesia, so as not to experience disappointment that something didn’t work out for me at the moment where it didn’t work out .Often a person who comes to a psychologist feels like a failure and weak. He thinks that he lost, that he failed. In his head he has an image of another who succeeded. A popular answer is who this other is and how he found out that this other is succeeding - he saw it on Instagram. On the one hand, this sounds frivolous, and the person himself rationally understands that this is a weak argument. But the rational part gives way to the emotional response. The emotional response to a picture on Instagram is very strong. This response (not differentiated) overheats the person, and his idea of ​​reality becomes polarized. As a result, the world becomes flat. It's like a rollback of a newer graphics model to an older one, where all the figures are flat and poorly drawn. There are only two colors in it: white and black, successful and unsuccessful, strong and weak, good and bad. Overheating from an internal response, the psyche resorts to releasing steam in all possible ways. And the fastest way to resolve the contradiction that has arisen between desire and capabilities is to imagine that someone was initially lucky, everything comes easy to him. Example: A person made some attempt, failed, and got upset. But he did not stay in this moment of the emergence of his feeling, but jumped out of it, interrupting this moment of being in the here and now with his unpleasant experiences. For this we have a universal way - to move to another level of generalization. The person decides to look at the situation from a different distance. Universal, or a little narrower - from the level of some group of people, united by age or gender. For example, such a person says: all women of my age know how and love, but I don’t know how and don’t love, so I’m wrong, a failure. Or all men of my age already have such and such success behind them, but I don’t, so I’m nothing of myself, a weakling. That is, playing “while others have” is a kind of anesthesia, so as not to experience disappointment, that something didn’t work out at the moment where it didn’t work out. The shift of affect from the place where it arose into global dissatisfaction with the structure of the world. It’s not my fault, but the way the world works. Once you get to a higher level of generalization, it’s much more difficult to go back to the situation and continue to explore this situation in which something didn’t work out. The way back lies through destroying the myth that there are these others, for whom everything is initially easy. This myth is destroyed by tightening contact with these people. When a person learns the wrong side of this success, he learns how much effort was put into ensuring that the person ended up where he ended up, what the person sacrifices for this - that in a situation of real, and not depicted success, this hours that add up to years of work. The uniqueness of this successful man is that he puts in the constant effort available to him. And he’s used to doing this, and considers it the norm. He considers constant work in the zone in which he gets results to be the norm. After he manages to debunk the myth of easy success as a gift of fate, a person can return to himself again. To his current micro-situation, in which he experiences himself as a failure, defeated. Having a real image of others, he can rely on them in order to stay in the situation in which he experiences unpleasant emotions. So as not to ignore them, find the best way to continue your movement. Myths about power: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3* Instagram belongs to the company Meta, which is recognized as an extremist organization in Russia.