Anchor The Habit Nobody Admits To.
By: Damintha Gunasekera
There is a Sinhala word every Sri Lankan knows. We learn it young, we feel it often, and we almost never say it out loud about ourselves. I am going to say it, because I have come to believe it costs this country more than most of the policy failures I have watched from the inside.
Irisiyawa. Envy. Not the harmless kind that admires and moves on, but the kind that quietly wants the other person to fail.
I left Sri Lanka at thirteen and spent twelve years abroad, across several countries, before choosing to come home. I have now worked inside Sri Lankan politics and business for seven years. And in those seven years, one pattern has repeated itself so consistently, across so many rooms, that I no longer think of it as individual behaviour. I think of it as culture.
The pattern
It looks like this. Someone starts something, a business, a project, a campaign, a career, and the first instinct of the people around them is not "How can I help?" It is "Why them and not me."
Not everyone thinks this way. But enough do that it shapes how the rest of us behave. Watch how we talk about success in this country. When someone does well, the first explanation offered is almost never talent or work. It is connections. Or a political godfather. Or, if the rise was fast enough, it must be something darker. He must be laundering. She must know someone. It cannot be clean. We would rather explain away a win than learn from it.
And here is the part that took me years to admit. I have caught myself doing it too. Hearing about someone's success and feeling that small sting before anything generous arrives. That is how deep this runs. It is not other people's habit. It is ours. Mine included. I am not writing this column from above the problem. I am writing it from inside it. Psychologists have a name for this pattern, and it exists everywhere from Manila to Melbourne: crab mentality, after the way crabs in a bucket pull down any crab that tries to climb out. We did not invent it. But few places have refined it like we have.
What it looks like elsewhere
In the countries that pulled themselves up within living memory, someone else's success tends to work differently. The entrepreneur down the road becomes proof that it can be done from here, by someone like me. A reference point. A mentor. Sometimes an early investor. Success is treated as evidence, and evidence spreads.
I saw versions of this abroad, and I want to be careful here, because the West has its own envy, its own status games, its own tall poppies cut down. No society is free of this. The difference I observed is one of degree and of default. In places where enterprise flourished, the default reaction to a peer's win leaned closer to curiosity than to suspicion. Here, too often, the default leans the other way. The person who rises becomes a target before they become an example.
Counting the cost
The damage is hard to see because it never arrives as one dramatic loss. It arrives as thousands of small ones, every day, for decades.
The young person who had a business idea and never started, because she could already hear what the relatives would say if it failed, and worse, what they would say if it succeeded. The professional who stopped sharing ideas in meetings after watching a colleague get torn down for shining too brightly. The official who saw a problem and stayed quiet, because the surest way to make enemies in a Sri Lankan institution is to be the one who gets noticed fixing something. The politician who softened a stance not because opponents attacked it, but because his own side would cut him first for standing out.
Every one of these moments is invisible. No headline records the company that was never founded or the idea that died in a room because someone decided it was better for it to fail than for someone else to succeed. But add them up across twenty million people and several generations, and I believe you get a meaningful part of the answer to the question we keep asking ourselves: why are we not further along?
We are not short of intelligent people. Anyone who has watched Sri Lankans excel the moment they land in Melbourne, London or Dubai knows the raw material is not the problem. We are not short of workers or of ambition. What we are short of is the genuine desire to see the person next to us win, and the understanding that their win makes ours more likely, not less.
The habit and the country
I do not think we were born with this. Habits like this grow in conditions of scarcity, where for generations the economy felt like a fixed pot, and one family's gain looked like another's loss. Decades of a closed, permission-based economy taught us that opportunity was rationed, and rationed things make rivals of neighbours. That history deserves its own column. But explaining a habit is not the same as excusing it, and inherited habits can still be broken. Because that is the good news buried in all of this, culture is not climate. It is not something that happens to us. It is the sum of small choices, repeated, and small choices can change. It costs nothing to congratulate first and question later. It costs nothing to make the introduction, share the contact, or forward the opportunity. It costs nothing to let someone else's success stand as proof rather than provocation.
A country where people decide, in ordinary daily ways, that a rising tide should lift everyone is a country that gets more entrepreneurs, more businesses, more young people willing to step into the economy and into politics. Everything we say we want downstream begins with this one shift upstream. I came back to Sri Lanka because I believe this country has everything it needs. Seven years on the inside have not changed that belief. But I have learned that the biggest thing standing in our way is not always a policy, a party, or a foreign power. Sometimes it is a habit. And habits, unlike geography, are ours to break. So, start where I had to. Notice the sting when it comes. Name it. Then choose the generous act anyway.
