The Four Faces of Envy
Three of them will eat you alive. One can make you better.
Every now and then, I’ll come across an article about a podcaster who’s having a lot of success, which means lots of people listening to their show. Most of the time when I read these articles, I think, “Bully for them.”
But every now and then, I have a different reaction.
Instead of being happy for this podcaster, I feel a pit in my stomach. I feel sad. “Man, what am I doing wrong that’s stopping me from having that level of success? I must be a sorry excuse of a podcaster.” And then sometimes my sadness turns to resentment, and I start making up a story about this person (a person whom I’ve never met): “Oh, I bet he probably gamed the system. I bet he’s a total douche in real life. Probably doesn’t call his mom and has bad breath.”
That’s a rotten thing to think about a person I’ve never even met. But I’ve had those thoughts. I am not proud of this.
And then I feel bad for having these thoughts, because I know I’ve given way to one of the seven deadly sins: envy.
Nobody likes to admit they’re envious. We’ll cop to all sorts of unflattering things. We’ll readily admit to being short-tempered, or disorganized, or wont to eat the whole sleeve of Oreos in one sitting. But envy? We don’t like to admit that. The novelist Herman Melville wrote that there’s something about envy that’s “universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime.”
Envy is the emotion we absolutely shudder to confess.
Why is that?
Well, if you admit to envy, you're admitting that you think someone is better than you — that you are, in some way, less than. That itself stings, but it’s also upsetting to acknowledge that someone doing better than you makes you feel so bad; it makes you feel like a small, petty person. For these reasons, disclosing our envy can make us feel pathetic and pitiable, and so we keep it to ourselves.
Today, I want to explore this seemingly rotten emotion, because while we don’t like to talk about it, it has an outsized impact on our lives. The sociologist Helmut Schoeck called envy “an anthropological constant” because it shows up across time and cultures. Kierkegaard said that if we want to understand the nature of being put out, we “must make a study of human envy.”
And as we’ll see, there isn’t just one kind of envy. There are four. Knowing which kind you’re experiencing gives a name to the emotion, and naming an emotion gives you some power over it, the same way knowing Rumpelstiltskin’s name gave the maiden power over that strange little man. And once you get a handle on your envy, it can even be turned into a positive force.
But before any of that, we’ve first got to talk about what envy grows out of: comparing ourselves to other people.
