The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Fight your demons

1) You’re becoming jealous of your friends/group mates.

Jealousy is powerful thing…and a dangerous one, too.

The desire to have what someone else has is, sadly, just part of human nature, and not something we can just turn off. People do it all the time: They envy how much money someone else has, they envy someone else’s level of influence, they envy the kind of car someone else has, etc.

However, when people find themselves in a zombie apocalypse, where there’s no more laws and no one to enforce them even if there were, that envy can suddenly become much more dangerous than it was before the apocalypse. Suddenly, things you once only wished you could have, now, you can actually take, if you’re willing to go that far. And that’s the problem.

Look at Shane for example. Shane started out trying to do right by his friend, taking Lori and Carl to safety after he had to leave Rick at the hospital.

But the moment Rick came back, Shane began to walk a dark path. During Rick’s absence, Shane and Lori began an affair, since Shane had told Lori that Rick was dead. Discovering that to be untrue, Lori abruptly ended their affair and reunited with Rick.

It became clear pretty quick that Shane had grown comfortable having a relationship with Lori, and he resented the idea of Rick coming back into the picture.

Within a day of Rick’s return, Shane was already contemplating taking Rick out to have Lori all to himself. He stopped himself, but not before Dale had noticed and was quite alarmed.

This is where jealousy can truly become a threat. When you’re jealousy is so great that you’re contemplating killing somebody to satiate it, you have a problem that needs to be dealt with.

Sadly, Shane did the opposite. As Season Two of the show progressed, Shane’s jealousy slowly began to consume him. He got more unstable and volatile as time progressed, leading to him eventually murdering Randall in an attempt to lure Rick into the woods to kill him as well.

If you start getting so envious of someone in your group in a zombie apocalypse that you’re thinking of attacking them to get what they have, that’s officially your cue to take a step back.

You need to ask yourself if what the other person has is so important you’re willing to kill them to get it? If this is a person you’ve been surviving alongside for a while, or especially if they’re a friend, you need to try to remember what they mean to you. No possession, regardless of what it is, is worth murdering a friend over.

You can’t let envy get the better of you, because there’s almost no way it’ll end well. Best case scenario, you’ll steal what the other person has, meaning they’ll resent you for it. Worst case scenario? You kill the other person to take what they have and the rest of your group kill you as punishment.

Don’t let loose the green-eyed monster, for you will be the first person it consumes.

Next: The Monkey On Your Back