Envy is an ugly emotion with awful effects. Many religions forbid or warn against it, as with the 10th commandment in the Old Testament; storytellers show its horrible effects. We all know that it’s bad on a feeling level, yet envy persists as a powerfully destructive force.
It isn’t about having very little; we aren’t particularly unhappy when we have very little. But we do become very unhappy, depressed, and bitter when we dwell on having less than our neighbor.
Yet there is an antidote to envy: empathy, curiosity, admiration, and the effective redirection of our initial impulses. It can also help to more fully understand this destructive and bitter emotion.
Envy de-humanizes the person envied. When we envy another person, we are not seeing that person for who they are, we are seeing him for what he has. It breeds malevolence; when we envy, we are not happy for the success of our neighbor, we are resentful of it.
Envy diminishes our capacity for empathy, and this lack of empathy makes it possible for people to do horrible things to one another.
It also reinforces a self-image of helplessness and impotence. Envy implies disbelief in ourselves; it presupposes that we don’t believe we can create the wealth, the relationships, the values that we see in others, and this helplessness can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, limiting our ability to work toward what we would like to create in our lives.
But like any negative emotion, by catching ourselves and understanding what we’re feeling, we can redirect our actions in a way that works much better for us.
Recent Comments