How I'm turning envy into a positive
Leveling the difference between "us" and "them" doesn't have to mean bringing someone else down
What We Talk About When We Talk About Envy
When watching a Spider-Man movie during family night this week, my brother mentioned listening to James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, on a podcast. I told him to shut up. He later pointed out my scathing negativity about James Clear in this post. Sudden, strong emotions are the sign of an unresolved issue. (As they say in recovery, “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” There’s another saying that resonates during the holiday season: “of course your family knows how to push your buttons—they’re the ones who installed them!”)
Friends are like teeth—if you ignore them, they go away—but the same can’t be said for mental health dilemmas or defense mechanisms. “Emotional avoidance” is when something is too sensitive or touchy to deal with or even discuss, and is a good sign that you need to work on something, lest you build up such a collection that your life becomes an emotional minefield.
Atomic Habits and Can You Learn to Be Lucky? were both on Fast Company’s list of 2018 books of the year. Because of that sensation of past familiarity, e.g., “I had math with Clear in high school,” I was, for a while, able to see us as peers. We were at the same starting line. And then, he sold 5 million copies.
Gimme status
Envy is feeling inferior because someone has bested us in an area that feels important. Not everyone gets this way—it’s more likely among those who give comparisons a lot of weight and mental space, coupled with a craving for status, either real or perceived. (It’s also likely among people high in “justice sensitivity,” inequity aversion, and “victim sensitivity.”)
Those who are less envy-prone are like my mother, whose official post-retirement motto is “I don’t care.” #FeministHero
To eliminate this painful discrepancy between someone else’s “superior” level and our own, we feel the need to level the playing field. To do so, we have two choices:
Lift ourselves up
Bring the fucker down
Which of these we choose says everything about us.
Leveling the difference: Bring them down
The painful “life isn’t fair, that person sucks” followed by using your energy trying to bring someone else down is malicious envy. Without it, the Real Housewives franchise would cease to exist; internet bullying, schadenfreude, most gossip, and all internet comment sections would become things of the past. People like my former roommate would stop saying things like “yeah he’s super rich, but he can’t possibly be happy! He probably founded that company to make up for his [imagined physical/spiritual/social deformity].”
Why do we want to believe that billionaires are unhappy? To level the difference.
Malicious envy is marked by a hostile motivation towards others: we don’t think they deserve what they have. We doubt that their good fortunes are the result of effort, seeing it as caused by something that we don’t have or can’t replicate. It’s a form of cognitive dissonance, or discomfort that stems from having conflicting thoughts: they don't deserve what they have; I can't get what they have. To reduce that inner conflict, we become motivated to level the playing field in the only way we feel that we can: by bringing them down.
In my case: I wrote an unnecessary post, which only highlighted some of my issues.
Lifting ourselves up
When people experience benign envy, they hold superior people in relatively positive regard, they strongly desire to attain their advantages as well, and they intend to invest more effort in improving themselves by moving upward and emulating the success of others.
With benign envy, we channel our emotions into inspiration to better ourselves. I’ve always felt this way about Maria Konnikova and Kathryn Schulz: they’re fiercely talented women, and I’d love to be like them when I grow up. They are kind people who write about things that matter—I’ve met both, who graciously volunteered their time and helped me realize what hard workers they are, and how much they deserve all the good things.
Turning Grapes (Envy) into Grappa (Something Positive)
Initially, I thought of James Clear as a peer, one whose fortune took a magic and undeserving turn for the better. I thought that way for a long, long time. I sat in self-pity. I sat in malicious envy, that tormenting feeling of he doesn't deserve what he has mixed with I can’t get what he has.
Good, benign envy channels our energy in something useful: learning lessons from someone else in order to elevate ourselves. The main belief that held me back stewing in toxic envy was the feeling that I didn’t have what it took to reach his level of success.
Look at my toxic core assumptions: He doesn’t deserve what he has. Who am I to be the arbiter of deservingness? Since when have I assumed that life is always 100% fair—and that I also haven’t received things that I “don’t deserve”? Why am I assuming that he didn’t work his ass off and deserve it? I had also worked my ass off...
But then I actually bought and read Atomic Habits. It’s wonderful and I can’t recommend it enough. The difference between our books is that his has a simple, useful framework and lots of actionable advice; my book tries to be clever and funny at the expense of being useful.1
Another toxic assumption I was making was that the universe has limited resources—that lots of success for Clear somehow meant less for me. Yet another lie: the universe is big enough for all of us. There are always other awards to receive, other surprises around the corner. For my narrative to be true, 5 million people would have had to say '“you know, I was going to read Can You Learn to Be Lucky? but instead I’m going with Atomic Habits.” Untrue. It’s wonderful that he’s sold books—it means that people still buy books!
So today, I’m focusing on putting my stuff into the world instead of sitting back and expecting the world to discover me. I’m learning about marketing. I’m developing a few book ideas with great frameworks that will actually be useful to other people.
I love this line of research because it helps me realize something that the Stoics seemed to have missed: emotions can be useful. Things get diceys when we let them lead us into unsavory areas of life, like your run of the mill addiction, numbing via consumerism, or denying/bottling them up until we explode.
Being resilient isn’t about denying emotions and motoring on. It’s looking for the lesson. It’s being able to process them in a healthy, useful way to avoid snapping at your brother and nearly ruining pizza night.
It’s about leaning in to the discomfort—then lifting yourself up.
Underthinking / tl;dr
Be inspired by the success of others. Being a hater is a waste of energy.
Lean into the lessons.
You never really know what other people have done to get to where they are.
If all else fails, just pretend that someone else has a horrible, incurable bed-wetting problem and would trade places with you in a heartbeat. (You never know!)
Note: I did think my book would be helpful, but, in hindsight, repeatedly chose LOOK AT MY WRITING. LOOK AT HOW MUCH RESEARCH I DID. LOOK AT MEEEEEE!