Feelings of inferiority can drive us to work harder, to want to become better than our current selves. That is good. That creates progress and innovation for humans. The sense that we are not as good as we could be can give us the courage to take action. Hence it is normal to develop feelings of inferiority, and in fact healthy.
Without the courage however, and with increasingly overwhelming feelings of inferiority, some of us develop this mechanism to excuse ourselves from taking any action and finding excuses for our inabilities. More perplexingly, we can even develop a sense of superiority to mask our lack of courage in taking action.
These can manifest in many scenarios.
Some will go: “If only my parents were rich, I might have gone to a better school, make better friends, have better opportunities, and make better life choices. Now I’m poorer and more miserable than my peers because they had a better family background than me.”
In another common example where we see people decking out from head to toe with luxury items and/or bragging about what they have: “By putting on an appearance that I’m better than you mask my sense of insecurity and inferiority of my own abilities and self-worth.”
In a more subtle and tricky way, there are also others that tries to show off how much they have done, trying to prove they have put in lots of work, but somehow they were not rewarded because of they are unlucky, unappreciated, or under-privileged. This is a very complicated complex in which both the superiority and inferiority complex are in application. “I lay out everything that I have done and it’s much more than others. [Superiority complex]. But the others seems to always get rewarded better than me because of A, B, C. I could have been so much better if not for these. [Inferiority complex seeking excuses, superiority complex implying that self is better than the others].”
And many more examples. Many of which happens to many of us.
And what keeps feelings of inferiority developing into an inferiority/superiority complex?
Courage.
My thoughts 