I wonder alone about all that I want -- 
How it seems to recede from me daily and far --  
As I walk through the loneliest places I know 
And I mildly curse the more fortunate ones

  Sometimes, within heaven, we make us a hell: 
  A dark habitat where we choose then to dwell, 
  Where we take what we have, and would give it all back, 
  Just to focus instead on whatever

  We lack 

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Envy is a weird emotion.

If you are around small children, or children of any age, you will rapidly realize both how natural and how pervasive envy is. Children tend to want whatever other children have, and to resent said children for the having.

This is often exacerbated by another common behavior among children, which is: they realize when they themselves are the ones being envied, and — they revel in it. This is a result of the interplay of natural emotions and our human tendency to want to see what (and who) we can impact, or even control.

In stories, we see this played out by the virtuous poor person who is made fun and lorded over by more affluent bullies. This is a trope so popular as to be almost universal, but one which has the unfortunate side-effect of skipping past the envy and going straight to “well, they deserve to be hated anyway”. And, to be fair, it the dividing line between wanting a better life and envying others for having what we may not can be almost impossible for us to spot from within the forest of our own feelings.

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One of the other bewildering things about envy is that it can work to undo virtually everything in our lives by turning our self-image inside out. Let me explain what I mean by way of an example.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that a young person decides they want to learn how to play a musical instrument. They begin to work, outside of school hours and beyond the sight of anyone they know, on the long and arduous process of how to physically and mentally operate their instrument. It is typically months or years before anyone would want to hear the music they are able to produce, but with time and application, they are gradually met with greater facility; that, in turn, starts to turn into public notice.

Being “good at something” is a thing we are all encouraged to do; so is “work hard” and “stick to it”. So they have successfully modeled the virtues that we are all taught. And what are they met with?

“Ugh. It’s not fair. You are so talented!”

The term “talent” is supposed to be a compliment, but it is far more frequently used as a subtle way of dismissing the amount of work people have put in to get good at their craft. We aren’t allowed to envy people who work hard, so we instead claim that people have some sort of genetic “talent” advantage that we can fairly resent.

Here is the paradox: by successfully modeling the virtues we are taught, we gain a skill, which is supposed to be a good thing: but people hate us for it, which is generally considered a bad thing. This is what I meant by calling envy “bewildering” and how it can “turn our self-image inside out”. Envious people don’t want others around them to stand out in ways that trigger their envy.

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I spent much of my teen and young adult life just trying to blend in. Being hated for your faults can be very difficult, but being hated for your virtues is in many ways worse. When I got to the point where I was reasonably good at playing the piano, I lost a lot of non-musical friends; when I then left music to pursue other interests in college, I found out there was another group of musical friends I thought I had who envied me for having choices.

In the mean time, I participated in all the common envies of my age: of better-looking guys, of guys with more money, and the ones who were more popular with girls for whatever reasons. So please don’t get the idea that envy was something I only saw as a target, I experienced it almost every type of way possible.

It is of very little benefit to tell people that envy is illogical. In that way, envy is like every other emotion. Of course envy is illogical, because we feel it before we have all the facts; we are even likely to continue to feel it when the facts tell us we should not.

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Gratitude, of course, is the counterbalance to envy. When we focus on what we have, the emotional power of whatever we feel we don’t have lessens.

If only there was a holiday set aside for gratitude…

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