Envy is Not Enough
How an outdated survival instinct continues to rule us — and ruin us.
Envy is a matter of who, not what. Familiarity breeds contempt, and similarity breeds envy. [1]
It’s not the CEO you’re jealous of — it’s your colleague who’s been promoted over you. It’s not the kid with the highest grade that bothers you; it’s the one who’s beaten you by just a little. One does not envy down [2], only (slightly) up.
Under envy, we don’t necessarily crave things; we crave a state of being. We want to be superior, or at least equal —never inferior — to those doing ‘better’ than ourselves, socially, materially, professionally, or otherwise.
Envy is found in every social stratum, every era, and every culture. As a survival instinct, envy compares tells you that you are not enough. Once, this was necessary. Food and strength, mating and social status, all these things once translated tangibly to survival and reproduction. Envy promotes a localized competitive spirit: it used to get the job done.
But for those of us scrolling through this article under the AC, envy has far outlived its use. We’re no longer hunter-gatherers living at the edge of starvation. Our material minimums are more than met — now modern envy disables our happiness, degrades our psyche, and generally causes a lot of pain. Envy blinds us to (a poorly distributed) abundance of modernity.
Three ways envy makes us suffer
Total competition. Achievement culture tells us that we must constantly one-upping others. It’s a recipe for deep dissatisfaction and chronic unhappiness, and a life stuck on the hedonic treadmill.
When envious, it doesn’t matter how much you make, how loving your partner, or how high your grades are; there’s always someone better off than you. Therein lies the problem. Envy not only leads us to desire what others have: it makes us reject what we currently possess.
Even when we get what we want, it’s never enough.
Bad faith. Call it the rat race, consumerism, the hedonic treadmill, whatever you like; envy-culture keeps us working for things we haven’t really thought through. We begin striving not to fulfill ourselves, but to impress others. In the far past, what impressed others — food, strength, friends, mating, etc. — was inherently fulfilling. Nowadays, most things are not: they are abstracted by the absurdities of bureaucracy, consumerism, and the illusion of meritocracy.
Envy perpetuates what we believe we should be doing, at the cost of what we truly want to be doing — or perhaps even who we are. Petty rivalries are built on envy; advertising has perfected it to an art.
Not only are our authentic goals taken away from us, but so is our journey towards them. Envy burns us out, deadens us, makes “acceptable”, “respectable”, conforming members of a localized society.
And so we lose ourselves — that which makes us individual — and in time, our authenticity.
Toxic culture. We’ve created a culture that actively promotes envy. We fetishize exceptionalism, reward total competition, worship perfectionism — compare ourselves to others, endlessly eroding our own achievements and satisfactions while striving to be better than everyone else — left unhappy, deeply insecure, and largely artificial.
We take these things as natural law. Is it not best to strive for perfection? Should not the winner take all? Isn’t the best life only possible for the fittest, the smartest, the most ruthless: the best? There is a mismatch between our survival drive and our modern reality of skewed abundance.
We’re constantly inundated with ‘calls to envy’. As we consume content our own thoughts tell us we are not enough: that others are more: that the only solution is more: more money, more friends, more experiences, more life. We’re running the whole planet into the ground with this mindset.
Overcoming Envy.
First we must realize; envy is the enemy. Beyond a point long passed, it’s destructive and zero-sum. The material gains it leads to are empty in the long term; social competition negates egalitarian relationships of friends, colleagues, and family. Envy may bring us closer to our “goals”, but at what cost?
Happiness. Fulfillment. Authenticity.
In an increasingly materialistic world, one typified by sprawling digital networks of connection and comparison, envy leads only to dissatisfaction and superficiality.
We lose sleep over 1) what we have 2) what we don’t have and 3) what others have.
As a whole, social media perpetuates this.
Still, I believe we can overcome envy by:
- Practicing gratitude (rejecting the hedonic treadmill)
- Living an authentic life (knowing and growing oneself, while rejecting insecurity)
- Recognizing sonder (the inherent sameness of life)
These principles reject the destructive, toxic, consumerist, artificial, and zero-sum nature of our modern envy.
When envies uncoil deep within us, we should ask ourselves “why do I feel this way?” We need to target the root of our insecurities, our anxieties — not feed them with envy, Schadenfreude, one-upmanship.
A word on Sonder. Each person has their own life, as real as yours, with all the human highs and lows in their continued struggles. Though some people’s lives might seem so much better, they struggle with much of the same emotions and problems we do, only with different life-variables.
Throughout history, those life-variables circle around the same few things. Work. Play. Duty. Love. Health. Humans have always struggled over these same things; all else is secondary. How they are expressed in each generation is transient and contextual. Realize your autonomy to shape your narrative. Define the terms, the words and the roles, that best suits you: stop competing. Start actualizing.
Final Words
The next time envy strikes, fight back. Practice gratitude and sonder. Maintain true relationships; surround yourself with people who support you, protect you, enable you in the best way. Do not compete: cooperate.
It’s insidious how deeply our values have been touched by envy, how much of society depends on it. Envy is a part of us, our biology and our history. But it doesn’t have to be how we are. And it should never be all we are.
