The Green-eyed
monster
Envy is often associated
with the color green and is portrayed as 'the green-eyed monster'. It is
wanting what others have, desiring to possess what they possess. You can be envious of
tangible and intangible things, including their wealth, their good looks and their innate
intelligence.
Envy is often an
'identity' thing, as the underlying dynamic is not so much about wanting the
things they have as wanting to be like them. Envy in such cases becomes generalised, from
thing to the whole person.
Envy can sometimes
be moderately positive, such as when you grudgingly admire what a friend
has achieved, but do not like them any less as a result.
The most common
form of coping with envy is, after recognizing it, taking a philosophical
approach that says something like 'This is silly. Life is too short to waste my energy on this
thing'.
Envy and jealousy
Jealousy is slightly
different from envy as it involves a third party. It can involve potential loss,
such as when we are jealous when someone threatens to woo away our boyfriend or girlfriend.
Envy is always about potential gain.
Envy and jealousy
overlap in the scenario where another person is admired by everyone else
for possessing something. This gives you a 'double whammie' as it means they are both giving
someone else attention and also not giving you attention. You are envious of the attention that
they are getting and jealous because you see them 'stealing' that attention from you.
Victim games
What is happening
here goes something like this:
- I see that you have got something.
- I see that I do not have that thing and
hence feel inferior to you.
- I justify this by making it unfair, that
I am a victim.
- This makes you the 'bad guy'.
- I can now legitimately dislike you, perhaps
even making you the victim.
Notice how we work
hard to justify to ourselves that feeling envious, an emotion we may
consider to be generally undesirable, is in fact ok for us to feel in these 'special' cases.
Sometimes we even retrospectively create
envy when something bad happens to other
people, so we can say 'they deserved it'. Again, this is all about justifying to ourselves that we
can feel bad about other people.
Schadenfreude
This is a German
word that describes how we often cope with envy. It is the gloating feeling we
get when we enjoy seeing another person suffer. We particularly seek schadenfreude in people
we envy, an emotion which the press tap when they publish stories of the woes of the rich and
famous.
So what?
To create envy
in a person, point out what other people have that they do not. Emphasise the
bad qualities of the other people to allow the person to legitimise their feelings of envy.
You can also create
envy of yourself by showing off. Avoid the backlash by doing this subtly.
Done with care, this makes the other person want to be like you and hence like you.
