Envy Might Not Be as Bad as you Think Part 1

     When we think of envy, typically what comes to mind is that it's one of the Seven Deadly Sins. It's an unpleasant emotion that occurs when we see others in the position, place or social status we aspire to be on par with, but yet we find ourselves below the person in those areas. Envy is also a ubiquitous emotion, commonly arising in one form or another in our everyday circles, whether we ourselves are conscious of it or not. At first glance, it seems like we should try to suppress it and do our best not to feel it, but no matter how much we try, envy continues to appear. If you feel envious of someone, there might be an important meaning behind it than you realize and instead of feeling guilty about it, taking the time to learn about your envy can eventually lessen those unpleasant emotions and inspire you to engage in proactive behavior, growth and personal development. According to Josh Gressel in his book Embracing Envy: Finding the Spiritual Treasure in Our Most Shameful Emotion​, he writes in the introduction that he is "of the opinion that God did not make any one of us defective or inferior nor are any of the emotions with which we grapple defective or inferior. This means that envy, while shameful and shunned, is every bit as much a part of God's plan as joy, gratitude, anger, or hatred. Yet how can we uncover its part in creation if we won't look at it, explore it and feel it?" (Gressel, page 2). If anything, envy is felt because there is a greater purpose for it than we realize. The problem is that because it's such an uncomfortable subject, we avoid it at all cost, exacerbating the problem even further. In this post, I'm going to discuss my own experience with envy and my main takeaways from the subject matter so far and in Part 2, discuss ways to make peace with the emotion on the spiritual level. 
     Before we begin, I'll start by clarifying that the words envy and jealousy tend to get used interchangeably many times in the English language, but they actually aren't synonyms. Jealousy is the emotion in which you want to protect what is rightfully yours, which is less shameful than envy. You go to great lengths to secure what you've already earned. Envy on the other hand is when you look at another person's gain in contrast to where you are lacking. Openly admitting that you feel that way sends the message that you feel inferior to the other person in some form or another. For example, if you say, "I'm envious of Jimmy's ability to play chess" or "Andrea's skill to market and sell", what you are really saying is that you know you are lacking where you feel like you need to improve most. Seeing others successful and feeling a tinge of discomfort is neither good nor bad, but it's how you choose to respond to your current situation that makes all the difference. Thus comes the two sides of envy, benign and malicious  envy, benign envy, being constructive in which you spend time improving yourself and your skills to get to where you need to be and malicious envy is where you try to bring the other person a peg down. Of course, choosing the latter yields to causing harm not only to the person you envy, but to others around you including yourself. You gain nothing out of it, whereas benign envy encourages proactive change and the right mindset for you to grow and reach your full potential. The YouTube channel, Psych2Go has a deftly made interview with psychology professor, David Ludden on the topic. Their video, What is the Psychology of Envy? [Interview] delves into the concept of envy thoroughly and thoughtfully gets the viewer to ask themselves the right questions, reframing and taking on a neutral view on the concept of envy. (I will discuss a point brought up in the video later in this post). 
     To answer the question asked at the end of the video and to describe my own experience feeling envy, positive or negative, I'll start my story off with a similar goal to that of Josh Gressel's when penning his book, Embracing Envy. I'm not going to conclude with any one definitive answer, since no two people's experience with something is ever exactly the same, but rather I too, want to go through this post deepening and furthering questions. The way I see envy is that it's a learning process that if approached constructively, will contribute to our growth. I started to feel envious of someone who I never even met, but he and I went to school in the same area around the same time. Although we've never met, I have met friends and acquaintances of this person. He went onto create an rpg (role playing game) video game that became massively successful a few years ago and while I didn't think much of his success at first, the more people talked about this kid and boasted about his game, the more I started to feel myself cringe. I can easily say without hesitation that I quite liked what he made. It may not have been the best game I've ever played, but I was impressed with his ability to bring life to very simplistic characters, collaborate where he needed an extra set of hands, and especially compose all of the music. And yet, that uncomfortable feeling of cringe started to hang at the back of my mind. What made my feelings even more strange was that he is an indie game developer and the area I aspire to be in is comics/illustration.
     Upon fully accepting and owning up to those sentiments, I finally began to ask myself why am I envious of him? I'm not interested in pursuing game development, so why am I envious of someone who is pursuing something seemingly different than what I'm doing? Thus my main takeaways start to come to mind. First, I needed to take a step back and reevaluate my situation compared to his. One of my main weaknesses was that I was very disorganized when it came to setting up goals for projects that I hoped to accomplish. I piled up a slew of projects I wanted to get done, but found myself spreading myself too thin whereas this developer had his mind on one project and that one project alone until he finally completed it. Another thing is that we tend to envy those who are similar to us in some capacity and are geographically close to us. Like this young developer, we have animators, comic artists and musicians as connections and, as I mentioned earlier, we attended school in the same area around the same time. To top it all off, we both live in the same town and I've met people who know someone who knows him or know him. Last, but not least, this part goes without saying, but I feel that the most important root of my envy was that he seemed to have had everything in his life all figured out in his early 20's than I did. 
     Although I don't know how other people respond to their own feelings of envy, I think we all have our own approaches to learn from it upon thoughtful self-reflection. Upon embracing the emotion, there are a variety of ways to improve your situation and loosen the grip envy has on your life. One path I took after accessing my situation was that I not only started setting long term goals for myself, but I started narrowing specific goals. I now ask myself 'what do I hope to accomplish by such and such a day?' and stick to the project without letting myself get distracted by the other ideas I have in mind. Finish what I set out to do now and prepare the next one afterwards. Currently, it's the Pascal and the Timeless Hotel remake that has been on the forefront of my other projects. At the time of this writing, it's now 95% completed. Finding my target market and exclusively centering my entire focus is another component to lessening envy. The main reason I was scattered around the way I was had every bit to do with me trying to get too ambitious, yet never specifying who my audience is. I always knew I wanted to be an artist, but did I want to be an animator, graphic novelist, game developer or musician? The problem was that I wanted to be innovative, so I put all my focus on being innovative, but never found the right approach to do so all because I never really specified my main medium. In the end, I learned I had to stick to one medium, continue developing the skills in that specific medium and thus, innovation starts to take shape. I chose to stick to making graphic novels primarily, but rather than letting myself get caught up in other forms of media to incorporate into my books, I should practice the techniques of making a basic comic. From there, once I had my rock to stand on, innovation can flourish. I can experiment with other artistic techniques as long as they are still within the realm of my medium and my target market, which are people who read graphic novels.
     This is a lesson I've learned from taking Moore Art School founder, Rod Moore's Udemy online course on starting a business teaching art, and of any skill I feel I need to practice the most is identifying my role easily or what they call the elevator pitch. The lesson reminded me of an article I found on Your Tango, entitled Stop Feeling Envy & Focus on Yourself With These 3 Steps Instead by Jane Evans. The second step Evans discusses upon examination of the root of your envy is to '[d]efine your aspirations', in which she poses the questions, "[w]hat aspects of your personal and professional life do you feel that you lack? What dreams, wishes, aspirations, and goals did you leave behind?" She concludes this step by reiterating the main point and encourages the reader to write down their aspirations "so that [the reader] can think about them proactively" in order to "make some meaningful changes". Although Rod Moore's lesson seems unrelated to the suggestion made by Jane Evans, from my end of things, being able to identify your goals effectively has a huge impact on how you feel about yourself and the progress you're making. If you find yourself stuck trying to identify what direction you're heading, you don't have a specific goal to serve as a blueprint for your foundation and you find your brain is scattered all over the place, that you never get anything done and, worse yet, your audience is left confused. As a result, you might find yourself abandoning everything you set out to do as was the case with me. Being scattered was one of the main factors that weighed into the roots of my own envy, if not thee main factor. 
     Maybe what worked for me might not be the right answer for other people in a similar situation. Nevertheless, there are many ways to respond to envy appropriately. Thus I'll describe some additional takeaways. The short answer I found that the best way to mitigate envy is by accessing your situation and also asking yourself not 'how could I be envious of anyone', but rather 'why am I envious?', examine what lead up to the envious sentiments, evaluate your strengths and weaknesses and build your plan to improve yourself. As stated by David Ludden in the Psych2Go video, "emotions provide us with information about our current situation and motivation to do something" and the role envy takes is to "provide us with the information about our status and the social structure". When on the topic of mindfulness, Ludden makes the point that some may feel a twinge of envy if they see others in the position they wished to be in, "but if you're aware of your habits, you can change them. This is especially true when you understand you can turn your negative envy into a positive motivation to improve yourself...[I]f we give into negative envy, it draws us into a vicious cycle that can be hard to escape". At the end of the day, you yourself have more control over your envy than your envy has over you if you mindfully reflect. The worst that you can do is succumb to bad habits, which potentially lead to the dark side of envy. There's more to add to the discussion of envy, plus the most important question worth exploring, 'how does spiritually play a role in it?, all of which I'll cover in Part 2. I'll end the post by leaving a link to an interview with Josh Gressel on Business Innovators Radio Network, in which both the interviewer and the interviewee himself touch upon some valid points I want to delve into in the next blog. Until then, stay safe, everyone. God Bless!