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Crab Mentality

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Verified by Emotional Intelligence Developer Community-written · Human experiences · Lived insight

Maybe many know the shape of crabs, but not many know the nature of crabs. Hope you don’t have a spiteful crab nature.

In the Philippines, rural people love to catch and eat rice field crabs. The crab is small in size but tastes quite delicious. The crabs are easily caught at night, then put in a basin/container, untied. The next day, these crabs will be boiled and then eaten for side dishes for several days.

The most interesting of these habits, the crabs will always try to get out of the basin, with all their might, using their powerful claws. But a good crab catcher is always calm even though his hunting is always trying to escape. There is only one recipe, that is, the hunter knows very well the nature of the crab.

If a crab almost escapes out of the basin, its friends will pull it back to the bottom. If anyone else climbed quickly into the mouth of the basin, again his friend would pull him down… and so on until finally no one made it out. The next day the hunter just boiled them all and the flock of spiteful crabs died.

Similarly, in this life… Unknowingly, we also sometimes become like those crabs. Spitefulness or envy is a word that we often hear in everyday life. In the family, a younger brother is jealous of his brother when his parents buy him a new motorcycle. A friend was envious when he saw his deskmate get the highest score in the math test in class. In the office, A is jealous of B because B gets a promotion.

A spiteful person is a person who always cannot accept the reality of other people’s successes. Who should be happy if our friend or relative experiences success we even suspect. Especially in business or other things that contain elements of competition, envy, spite, or hypocrisy will be more real and if not we immediately realize we have unknowingly killed ourselves.

A sign of a person is a “crab”:

  1. Always remember the mistakes of others (can be other people or situations) that have been past and make it a principle / guide in acting,
  2. Criticize a lot but no change,
  3. Like to talk about other people’s weaknesses but does not realize his own weaknesses so he is only busy pulling crabs that will come out of the basin and forget about his own escape efforts.

The crabs should have helped each other out of the basin, but well… it takes a big soul to do it.

For wherever there is jealousy and selfish ambition, there you will find disorder and evil of every kind.

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One response to “Crab Mentality”

  1. Clive Avatar

    Very insightful… gives you a good perspective

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