#41: Dealing with uncool emotions: envy, jealousy, resentment
Do you listen to podcasts like this one and think: But this advice is for people who are much nicer than me, who deserve success; it's not for me, who secretly hopes that their more successful colleague steps on a rake at their earliest convenience? Do you simmer with resentment even while you're doing the heart-reaction-thing on your friend's Facebook post about her new job? Is envy your dirty little secret, and yours alone? This episode is for you.
References:
Protasi, S. 2018: 'Love your frenemy', Aeon.
Protasi, S. 2022: 'Beyond envy's dark side', IAI.
Episode transcript:
Think you don’t deserve good things because you sometimes get a bit envious?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello there, imperfectionists. You work in a very competitive field, right? Maybe that’s academia. Or maybe it’s something else - I know I have some listeners outside academia (hello to you!) and that the obstacles and anxieties that plague academics crop up elsewhere too. Whatever competitive, dog-eat-dog environment you operate in, let’s pause for a moment to appreciate how great it is that you and all of your colleagues and peers are above nasty emotions like envy, jealousy, and resentment. You’ve never tasted sour grapes after losing out to someone else on that position or that grant or that publication you went for, have you? No way. You celebrate other people’s successes as if they were your own. I mean, sure, sometimes you’re disappointed - but you deal with it constructively and wholesomely. You refuse to ruminate on it, and instead you learn lessons and bounce back and use it to grow stronger and better. Sour grapes are for other people - weaker, more petty, silly people - not you. You have a whole cupboard full of delicious lemonade that you’ve joyfully concocted from all those lemons that life has thrown at you.
Ok, friend, let’s drop the act. Because, careful as we are to present that ‘make lemonade’ face to the world, we all harbour a dirty little secret. Envy and other unfashionable emotions are for people like us too. Why wouldn’t they be? We’re all human, and we’re capable of the full range of emotions, even the ones we wouldn’t admit to. Even my coaching clients, with all the confidentiality and open-mindedness I promise them in our sessions, are shady about feeling certain things. I can count on one hand the number of clients I’ve had who have been frank and open about envying or resenting their more successful peers in our coaching sessions. Plenty more clients hint at these sorts of feelings but skirt around them, and avoid explicitly articulating them. And why wouldn’t they? The self-help sphere is full of motivational messages about picking ourselves up after a knock-back and becoming better versions of ourselves. There are no motivational posters about the value of sitting at home crying into a bag of Doritos and fantasising about sticking pins in that colleague who managed to get that award that we think we should have got. Envy, famously, is one of the so-called seven deadly sins associated with the Christian tradition - but, at least by our contemporary standards, it’s an especially objectionable attitude. Many people will happily admit to any of the other sins on the list - lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, and pride - before they’ll admit to feeling properly envious. And so, where does that leave you, if you find yourself eaten up with it? In a pretty bleak place, actually. Envy itself is an uncomfortable emotion. It’s unpleasant to experience. And we compound that unpleasantness when we then pile on the self-criticism, telling ourselves that we’re nasty for feeling envious, that if we were a better sort of person we’d be putting a positive spin on whatever it is, that we ought to be out there making lemonade. It doesn’t help that the fact that people are so reluctant to admit to feeling envious or jealous or resentful can leave us feeling that we’re the only nasty one in here. But we’ve got that all wrong. Let’s dig a bit deeper here.
The philosopher Sara Protasi, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Puget Sound in Washington state, has published a book on envy. Let me quote in full a paragraph from an article of hers on the Institute for Arts and Ideas website:
‘Envy is a painful perception of a close or similar other’s superiority; their success—Aristotle says—feels like a reproach to us, it reminds us of what we could have been, had, or achieved. When the distance between us and the envied feels unfillable, that’s when the nastiness arises—we become hostile and aggressive toward the other person, and we may even make up (unconsciously) some excuses as to why they are to blame. It’s too hard to admit the other person may have worked harder or studied more than us (and thus deserve their better position), so we tell ourselves and others that they did something wrong. We smear their reputation, or invent some injustice. We try to bring them down, sometimes literally, as in some sports competitions where rivals are tripped, or worse, as in hate crimes and biblical stories.’
In this paragraph, Protasi highlights a few important features of envy. It’s painful: feeling envious is not enjoyable. It’s focused on someone who we believe is similar to us in some way: you’re more likely to find yourself obsessing enviously over a colleague’s superior publication record than you are over, oh I don’t know, the fact that Kendall Jenner has a private jet and you don’t. It makes us feel inferior: when we envy another person, we’re focused on the fact that we don’t measure up to them in some way; perhaps they’re richer, or better looking, or their CV is more impressive than ours. It’s exacerbated when we feel left behind by them; when their impressiveness is a reminder of what we’ll never achieve. And we’re often inclined to justify our negative feelings towards them by blaming them in some way: perhaps the person we envy never wronged us in any way, and so we feel unjustified in our negative feelings towards them unless we can invent some injustice that we’ve suffered at their hands. Now, thankfully, we don’t always go as far as to try to ‘bring down’ the other person - which Protasi points to as an extreme consequence of envy. Often, it’s only ourselves that suffer when we feel envy. And, given that we don’t tend to expect comfort and sympathy from others when we’re feeling envious, it’s a pretty lonely form of suffering.
Protasi has distinguished between envy and resentment. Resentment, unlike envy, involves an injustice. If your colleague got a job that you wanted simply because she worked harder than you did, you can envy her, but you can’t resent her, because you didn’t suffer an injustice in this case. It’s just that she, fairly and squarely, got something that you wanted. On the other hand, if your colleague got a job that you wanted because her parents were on the recruitment panel, you may well have reason to resent her. In this case, you’re the victim of injustice. She benefitted from inside links that weren’t available to you, and which shouldn’t have influenced the hiring decision. Protasi warns us that we’re often inclined to tell ourselves that we’re experiencing resentment when really it’s just envy. It just makes it easier to stomach if we can tell ourselves that we’ve been wronged. But even so, resentment isn’t something we’re happy to admit to either. That pesky self-help narrative tells us to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves down when we’ve experienced a knock-back, regardless of whether we’ve been wronged. No point dwelling on the past, is there? Turn that frown upside down and move on to the next challenge!
So, envy, resentment. What about jealousy? Well, in everyday conversation, we tend to use the terms ‘jealousy’ and ‘envy’ interchangeably, so distinguishing between them is probably unnecessary when it comes to making sense of your own feelings. But, if you insist, Protasi explains the difference between these emotions too. Envy is something we experience when we notice that another person has something that we lack, and we feel bad about it. On the other hand, we feel jealous when we fear losing something that we currently have, and when we then try to guard that thing. So, you might feel jealous when you witness your partner flirting with another person: in that case, you fear losing your partner’s affection and devotion - something that you think of yourself as already having - and you feel motivated to guard it - by, for example, finding some reason to interrupt your partner’s flirty interaction. By contrast, while we often feel like we’re experiencing jealousy when a colleague gets a job or an award or a partner that we wanted, strictly speaking, it’s envy, not jealousy, because the thing they got was never something we had.
So, there’s some conceptual analysis under our belts. What do you do when you find yourself experiencing any of these unpleasant and unfashionable emotions? Well, first of all - and I know you’re probably going to ignore me on this one, because you can’t help it - try not to make things worse by beating yourself up about it. Envy, jealousy, resentment - we all feel them from time to time. Merely experiencing them isn’t a sign that you’re morally flawed or inherently nasty or generally unhappy when anyone does well or any of the other things that we sometimes tell ourselves in these situations. I know, I know - these are things that it’s much easier to accept with the head, as it were, than it is to feel with the heart. But, even noticing what you’re doing is a step forward. Next time you feel one of these emotions, try saying to yourself: ‘I’m feeling envious, or resentful, or jealous, and it hurts, and I’m also giving myself a hard time about it.’ Noticing that it hurts is key here. None of us would choose to experience these things if we could avoid it. This is something I’ve heard from the handful of coaching clients who’ve admitted to feeling envious of another person: they’ve said things like, ‘I’ve muted this person on Twitter because I don’t want to be reminded of their success’ and ‘I avoid going to events that I know they’ll be attending’. You’re feeling this way against your will. Try to keep that in mind.
Ok, so avoiding triggers for things like envy is understandable - but let’s be careful not to take this too far. Emotions like envy can be valuable. Envy can tell us something important about ourselves - something that we might otherwise have a hard time noticing. Do you remember, way back in episode #5: Bitch, do you even dream? when I talked about how many of us have no idea about what we really want to do or to be in life, because we get so caught up on thinking about our limitations and what we can’t do, that we don’t even allow ourselves to dream about what our ideal life would look like if anything were possible? In that episode I gave you an exercise to help you dream big and work out what your dream life would look like. But emotions like envy can give you clues too. This is something Protasi talks about. When we feel envy, the sense of inferiority that it involves relates to some capacity or field or value that we care about. So, if you’re envious of your friend’s physical strength, that reveals that physical strength is something you care about - something that perhaps you’d like to develop in yourself. You don’t envy people for being or having or doing things that you don’t give a toss about, or that you definitely don’t value. You aren’t going to find yourself envying all the time that your cousin gets to spend working on a spider farm if working on a spider farm is not something that you’d value. Now, it sometimes happens that we find ourselves envying another person for being or having or doing something that we didn’t even realise that we cared about. Perhaps you’ve had that experience of finding yourself puzzled by the envy that you feel. Often we respond to that by telling ourselves not to be silly, kind of laughing at ourselves - but if instead we paused and reflected on what it is that we’re feeling, we might uncover something about ourselves that we hadn’t realised before. Imagine - and I’m loosely basing this example on a client that I had last year - imagine being happily married, raising a family, living in a house and a town that you love, everything going well for you, and then learning that a friend who is roughly the same age as you is about to get divorced and is planning to spend a year traveling around the world on her own. To your surprise, despite the fact that you think of yourself as satisfied with pretty much every aspect of your life, you feel a pang of envy. You could respond to that by laughing it off. Or, you could take a closer look. What is it that this friend has, that you don’t have, and that you wish you did have? Is it freedom? Time alone? Travel? Confidence? Being a bit selfish for a change and focusing on pleasing nobody but herself? Because, it’s something. It’s not just you being silly. Trying to work through this can be scary. It feels disruptive, and why disrupt your life when it’s going perfectly well? Well, don’t panic - it doesn’t have to be disruptive. It doesn’t have to prompt you to change anything, unless you want it to. Sticking with this example, this imaginary woman’s surprise pang of envy needn’t prompt her to get a divorce, like her friend, and leave her own home and family to travel the world. But perhaps it’s a sign that she hasn’t been listening to her own needs. Perhaps she needs a bit more freedom and alone-time than she’s been allowing herself. Perhaps she’s in a bit of a rut, and would benefit from introducing something new - a holiday, a change in career direction, taking that interior design course she’s always fancied. Whatever. This is something that her envy is telling her, and which she can choose to listen to or not. Something similar is true of resentment and jealousy too. In some cases, as Protasi warns us, those are envy in disguise. But if they’re not, they can alert us to truths about ourselves too. Perhaps your jealousy of your partner reveals that you’re not as secure about your relationship as you thought you were. Perhaps you’re resentful because you’ve been wronged in some way that you hadn’t realised, or because you’ve been reminded of some wrong that you suffered in the past and didn’t acknowledge. Don’t get distracted by thinking, ‘ugh, I shouldn’t be feeling this emotion - quick - think of something else!’ Sit with it and learn from it. It’s an opportunity to know yourself better.
Here’s another reason not to dismiss envy too hastily. Protasi argues that sometimes envy can be beneficial. Let’s go back to that paragraph of hers that we considered earlier, and in particular to the idea that the envious person kind of goes off the rails when she starts to view the envied person as having something that she can never have, and in extreme cases, she might try to sabotage the person she envies and to bring them down to what she views as her own, inferior level. There are roughly two problematic things here: one is the sense of powerlessness that the experiencer of envy has - that sense of ‘I can never get what they have’ - and the other is the preoccupation with the person they envy. That sense of powerlessness is only going to be made worse if you take the extra step of viewing the person you envy as having wronged you in some way, which turns you into a victim of injustice - because if the reason you don’t have what you want is because someone else is wrongfully keeping it from you, then your access to that thing is something that’s controlled by someone else, it’s not something that you can fix yourself. What a horrible situation to find yourself in. But that’s not what envy has to look like.
For Protasi, the sort of envy that can be positive is emulative envy. That’s something we experience when we shift our focus from the person we envy to the good that they have and that we want - beauty, career success, wealth, whatever - and when we open ourselves to the possibility that we, too, can access that good. It’s still not fun to experience. But, to quote Protasi, ‘The individual who feels emulative envy looks at the envied not as someone to deprive of desirable and valuable qualities or goods, but as a representation of what the agent herself could be or have, as a model for self-improvement.’ In other words, envy doesn’t have to be targeted at knocking the envied person down. It can, instead, focus on building ourselves up, on identifying and getting what we want, and on viewing the person we envy as a role model, as someone who has carved out a path that we can follow ourselves, or as an inspiration to carve out our own new path.
A word of caution here. If you’re experiencing envy, it’s a good thing to try to orient yourself towards emulative envy rather than a more destructive form of envy. But that doesn’t entail that you should apply pressure to ‘go emulative’ as a way of silencing yourself - as a way of saying to yourself, ‘stop feeling this way, feel that way instead!’ Perhaps it might help to view envy and other negative and uncool emotions as processes, or even journeys, rather than static states. If your colleague just got something you really wanted and you’re feeling that horrible pain of envy, aiming for emulative envy doesn’t have to involve forcing yourself right here, right now, to stop feeling grumpy and instead feel all positive and optimistic and inspired. That’s probably not even possible - and denying your negative feelings is a great way to feel even worse. I talked about this way back in episode #3: Rage against the positivity. Back then, I talked about how it can be important and valuable to allow ourselves a bit of time to wallow, to feel bad without pressuring ourselves to look for the silver lining in the cloud or, you know, get to work on that bloody lemonade. So, using envy as a positive force doesn’t need to be something you start to do right now, while you’re still watching everyone congratulate your bloody friend on her bloody success. I mean, even lemons need time to ripen on the tree right? Let yourself stew. Eat Doritos in your jammies. It’s not like you’re going to be doing that forever. And then, tomorrow, next week, or whenever, you can start thinking about what you can learn from the way you’re thinking about your friend’s success, and what it might mean for you and what you do next. Secretly and unfashionably, we’re all right there with you.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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