top of page

Envy

“A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones.” (Proverbs 14:30)

If we are honest, we all feel a little envious of others at times. The friend who seems to have it all – the perfect house, job, car, looks, children, holiday – they have something we want, something perhaps we feel like we deserve or are entitled to, after all we’ve worked hard, been good, done all the things we ‘should’ have done, and yet somehow we don’t have the thing we really want.

Social media plays into this perfectly since most people only tend to share photos of things going well – the children playing happily with perfect smiles, the flawless selfie (that has taken numerous attempts to get just right), the brand new fitted kitchen with beautifully tidy worktops – presumably because we want to present our ‘best self’ to the world, and the pressure to do so increases every time we compare ourselves negatively to others. Advertisers also use our desire to want what we do not have to convince us that we must buy their latest product in order to be happy. Of course advertisers also know that envy is never satisfied and continually thirsts for more, so our desire for the latest ‘new thing’ never really goes away – as soon as we’ve acquired the latest gadget, we start to hunger for the next one.

Envy is a word that we rarely use though. We tend to talk about feeling jealous (or “well jel”) of others, even though envy and jealousy are not the same thing. Envy refers to wanting something we do not have; something we want to gain or achieve. Whereas jealousy actually refers to being afraid of losing something – or more often someone - we already have to somebody else, so there’s usually a third party involved. For example, feeling jealous when an attractive friend flirts with your boyfriend or girlfriend.

Perhaps we avoid the word envy because it is regarded as one of the seven deadly sins, or because it is perceived as a more deeply rooted, more intense and therefore more destructive emotion than jealousy. Either way, envy certainly can create a monster, whether green-eyed or otherwise.

Take for example the recent wave of hatred directed at Dominic Cummings on social media and in the news. He claims he chose to break the rules of lockdown for genuine childcare reasons after developing symptoms of the corona virus. Whether or not this is true, and whether or not this can or cannot justify his actions, what is clear is that the almighty torrent of abuse unleashed upon him these past few days indicates that there is something much deeper going on here.

I wonder if, at least in part, envy has reared its ugly head. I wonder if the intense anger felt by the general public actually stems from an egocentric and selfish view of fairness. Let me explain. We feel angry at Cummings because it’s “not fair” that he was allowed to break the rules and we weren’t – that he got to do something that we “ought” to have been allowed to do.

Aristotle defined envy as pain at the sight of another’s good fortune, stirred by “those who have what we ought to have.” I wonder if it is this skewed sense of entitlement that is actually to blame for the deep hatred directed at Cummings. And oh how we love someone to blame in times of crisis – a scapegoat who takes on everyone’s faults and mistakes, not just their own. Perhaps our own latent feelings of anger towards the corona virus – since it has caused us so much pain, loss, loneliness, anxiety and frustration, and taken away our sense of control – maybe this deep-rooted anger has been added to intense feelings of envy towards a man who “got away with” doing something we wanted to do but weren’t allowed.

“When human beings cannot take their anger out on the thing that has caused it (in this case, the virus) they unconsciously search for substitutes and, more often than not, they find them.” (Rene Girard, 2014)

So perhaps the best antidote against feelings of envy is gratitude – to focus on the things we do have rather than the things we don’t. I challenge you to create a list of all the things you are grateful for during lockdown (try to find 10 if you can), and then notice how it makes you feel.


bottom of page