Nice, Not Jealous, Not Envious

"For me right now, more important than success is being comfortable with who you are, that you are nice, not jealous, or envious."
(from my tweets, 2015)

A lot of my old tweets were about envy, but usually from the other side. I wrote that only about 20% of people will be genuinely happy for you when things go well, and that the people who value you for who you are, and aren't jealous, matter more than any accomplishment.

This tweet turned the question around. Instead of asking who is jealous of me, it asked what kind of person I want to be. The answer was simple: comfortable with myself, nice, and not jealous or envious. I put that above success.

That ranking holds up well against the research. Envy is one of the most common ways we quietly undermine our own happiness.

What envy is

Aristotle gave one of the earliest definitions. In his Rhetoric, he described envy as a kind of pain at the good fortune of others, especially people who are like us, our "equals." We rarely envy a king or a movie star. We envy the colleague, the classmate, the friend whose career took off.

Psychologists Richard Smith and Sung Hee Kim reached a similar conclusion in their 2007 review of envy research. Envy, they found, is an unpleasant mix of inferiority, longing and resentment. It is strongest when someone close to us excels at something we care about. It is also a painful emotion to admit, even to ourselves, which makes it easy to disguise as criticism or cynicism.

Social psychologist Abraham Tesser described the same pattern in his self-evaluation maintenance model. When someone close to us outperforms us in an area that is central to who we are, it threatens our self-image. When they shine in an area we don't care about, we can bask in their success instead.

Two kinds of envy

Not all envy is the same, though. Dutch researchers Niels van de Ven, Marcel Zeelenberg and Rik Pieters distinguished between two types in a 2009 study.

Malicious envy wants to pull the other person down. It comes with resentment and a hope that they fail.

Benign envy still stings, but it pushes us to lift ourselves up. It says, "I want what they have, so let me work for it."

In later research, the same team found that benign envy could actually motivate people to perform better, more than simple admiration did. So the pang you feel when a friend succeeds isn't necessarily a character flaw. What matters is which way you let it point.

Why envy costs us so much

Envy is unpleasant in itself, but it also changes how we see our own lives. Sonja Lyubomirsky and Lee Ross found that happy and unhappy people respond to comparisons very differently. In their 1997 experiments, unhappy students felt worse when a peer did better than them, even if they had done well. Happy students were much less shaken by how others did. They judged their results more by their own standards.

There is good news here too. Michael McCullough, Robert Emmons and Jo-Ann Tsang found in 2002 that people with a more grateful disposition reported less envy. It makes sense: it's hard to resent what someone else has while you're paying attention to what you already have.

What the philosophers said

Bertrand Russell gave envy a whole chapter in The Conquest of Happiness (1930). He called it one of the most powerful causes of unhappiness and noticed how relative it is: beggars, he wrote, do not envy millionaires, but they will envy other beggars who are more successful.

Russell also saw that envy has no finish line. "If you desire glory," he wrote, "you may envy Napoleon. But Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed." No amount of success cures it, because there is always someone further ahead. His remedy was to enjoy the pleasures that come your way without constantly measuring them against someone else's.

That is the quiet wisdom in my old tweet. Success doesn't protect you from envy. Being comfortable with who you are does.

Some honest caveats

Envy research mostly relies on self-reports, and people don't love admitting envy. The distinction between benign and malicious envy is also debated among researchers. Some see them as two separate emotions, others as one emotion with different outcomes. And the gratitude studies are largely correlational, so they show that grateful people envy less, not that gratitude alone will cure envy.

Still, the overall picture is consistent: envy hurts, comparison feeds it, and the way we respond to it is partly up to us.

How to be less envious

• Name it. When you feel that sting, call it envy, quietly and without shame. Naming it makes it easier to decide what to do with it.
• Turn it into information. Ask what exactly you envy. Often it points to something you want for yourself and can work toward.
• Choose benign over malicious. Let the feeling push you up, not pull them down.
• Practice gratitude. List a few things you already have that you'd hate to lose.
• Celebrate out loud. Congratulate the person you envy. Be one of the 20% who are genuinely happy for others.
• Compare with yourself. Measure today against who you were a year ago, not against someone else's highlight reel.

Today's reflection

Who did you last feel a sting of envy toward? What does that feeling tell you about what you want? And what would it take to be genuinely happy for them?

Sources

• Aristotle. (ca. 4th century BCE). Rhetoric, Book II, Chapter 10.
• Lyubomirsky, S., & Ross, L. (1997). Hedonic consequences of social comparison: A contrast of happy and unhappy people. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(6), 1141–1157.
• McCullough, M. E., Emmons, R. A., & Tsang, J.-A. (2002). The grateful disposition: A conceptual and empirical topography. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(1), 112–127.
• Russell, B. (1930). The Conquest of Happiness. Chapter 6, "Envy."
• Smith, R. H., & Kim, S. H. (2007). Comprehending envy. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 46–64.
• Tesser, A. (1988). Toward a self-evaluation maintenance model of social behavior. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 21, 181–227.
• van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2009). Leveling up and down: The experiences of benign and malicious envy. Emotion, 9(3), 419–429.
• van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2011). Why envy outperforms admiration. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(6), 784–795.