Tim is good at lying to himself. To try and be like Tim is foolish. It is impossible.
By choosing one road in life we do not take another. It is natural to look at those who took a different path and envy them - or at least to envy some aspect of their lives. To tell myself that I am like Tim is to deny this fact. We all do it.
How can we use envy? That is the real question.
Philosophers Mail is a philosophical spoof on the Daily Mail newspaper. Here is a good article on putting envy to use.
I use envy to figure out what to do with my free time.
step 1) figure out who I'm jealous of and why
step 2) change my life to do what they're doing
Fortunately for me I tend to be jealous of people doing achievable things like hiking far distances or starting companies or being in killer shape -- rather than jealous about things I couldn't possibly achieve like becoming a movie star.
So far step 1 + step 2 put together have been a pretty good cure for the post-ERE "oh god I could do anything or nothing, what am I doing tomorrow?"
akratic wrote:
Fortunately for me I tend to be jealous of people doing achievable things like hiking far distances or starting companies or being in killer shape -- rather than jealous about things I couldn't possibly achieve like becoming a movie star.
Good point.
Do we really get to decide who or what we envy? It seems like you are saying we don't get to choose. I agree.
When I watched Dragline's video in the sports thread I envied the fatherly pride he must have felt at that moment. When I read theanimal's posts about his upcoming packraft adventure I envied his youth, toughness, and boldness to set out into the wilderness alone. When I read some of the million dollar journals I envy their wealth.
It is tempting to deny the fact that I experience that envy. I may have been guilty of that in the past.
I don't envy other people if they're doing something that I have even the slightest chance of accomplishing. I just jump right in and try and learn it. (I've always had a misplaced optimism about my own potential. )
I envy what I can't have--youth, good looks, creativity, smarts. I'm embarrassed by how often I feel that pang. I suppose it propels me to try harder to compensate for my shortcomings. I guess that's using the envy in a way.
I avoid envy. To me it's a too negative an emotion, and things that start in negativity tend to stay there for me. It's maybe a subtle thing, but when I see someone that has a certain degree of success that I wish I had, I tend to channel it as inspiration without any sort of competition/judgement between me and the party in question.
That said, I can see where envy could be the fuel that propels a person to success, and there's may ways to skin a cat, as they say.
jennypenny wrote:I don't envy other people if they're doing something that I have even the slightest chance of accomplishing. I just jump right in and try and learn it. (I've always had a misplaced optimism about my own potential. )
I envy what I can't have--youth, good looks, creativity, smarts. I'm embarrassed by how often I feel that pang. I suppose it propels me to try harder to compensate for my shortcomings. I guess that's using the envy in a way.
Don't sell yourself short JP, I think you're super smart.
At this point in my life, I feel like I am somebody who has suffered more from "Be careful what you wish for little girl or you will surely get it (and all the multitudinous associated carrying costs, etc.)" than unrequited envy. Also, I think envy is supposed to be okay/useful but jealousy and coveting are always bad for you and/or a sin.
IlliniDave wrote:Actually, envy is one of the so-called "seven deadly sins". But in the Old Testament God is described as a jealous God. So if from that perspective, it's actually the opposite (regarding jealousy versus envy).
I wonder if that is not part of the problem. Envy and jealousy are two of the primal instincts that serve (and served) to protect us as we evolved.
Do I control the part of me that generates the envy? Can I avoid it? Calling it a sin certainly implies that I have power over it. But what if I don't? What if the envious thoughts just pop into my head without any effort by me? Neuroscience seems to be showing that I don't actually control the unconscious freakshow that pukes up thoughts into consciousness. They just appear. Monkey mind. It is also showing that attempting to control or avoid thoughts tends to backfire.
Says Harvard University psychologist Daniel Wegner, author of White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control. His research has shown that trying very hard not to think about something almost guarantees that we will think about it.
If that's the case then tramping it down, denying it or avoiding it may cause a whole lot of additional problems. Might it make more sense to pick it apart and look at the constituent pieces? If I look at my envy of the theanimal's boldness I can then consider the chaos a similar boldness would wreak on my life. That in turn gives me a greater appreciation of it and allows me to imagine living different ways.
Accepting one's thoughts non-judgementally is actually one of the pillars of mindfulness meditation, which suggests that thoughts and emotions are just let's say something that comes out of the brain unconsciously and should not be taken that seriously.
I'm very much for these ideas, it seems too obvious to me that our thought patterns are somehow inherited and as part of ourselves as having two arms or two legs.
Concerning the envy, I think that it's only useful when you can see why you're feeling it and direct your efforts into overcoming it by improving yourself. In this regard I think that meditation can help you become more aware of when you're feeling envy and working on it from there.
IlliniDave wrote:Actually, envy is one of the so-called "seven deadly sins". But in the Old Testament God is described as a jealous God. So if from that perspective, it's actually the opposite (regarding jealousy versus envy).
I wonder if that is not part of the problem. Envy and jealousy are two of the primal instincts that serve (and served) to protect us as we evolved.
I'm not a theologian, but I think from that (theological) perspective envy is seen as extending beyond jealousy to the point of distinctly wishing to possess specifically what belongs to another, or at least wishing for the other to lose what they have. So, at some point in the train of thought the other person is harmed. Seeing a person with a very nice home and deciding you would like to have a nice home too would not be seen as envy. Wishing that person would have the house foreclosed or that it would burn down because you did not have one so nice would be envy.
In common diction envy does not always have that implicit malicious component.
However, psychologists have recently suggested that there may be two types of envy: malicious envy and benign envy—benign envy being proposed as a type of positive motivational force.
This would have been useful had I placed this in the first post. If only I knew it then....
The Buddhist concept of mudita, "sympathetic joy" or "happiness in another's good fortune", is cited as an example of the opposite of schadenfreude.[14][15] Alternatively, envy, which is unhappiness in another's good fortune, could be considered the counterpart of schadenfreude. Completing the quartet is "unhappiness at another's misfortune"—which can be called sympathy, pity, or compassion."
I'm not sure these types of emotions are terribly useful other than as perhaps a starting point for better understanding our inner selves. I agree its better to acknowledge these feelings than pretend they don't exist, but then ask ourselves why we feel that way and what we should do about it. I'd say its normal and healthy to feel envious or jealous every once in awhile, but not normal or healthy to feel that way all the time.
