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The picture was of a good looking, blond man in his 40s. He was smiling at the reader from the top left hand page of the daily newspaper. A glance at the headline let me know it was an obituary of an area psychologist, prominent for his best selling books.
Two parallel tracks ran through my mind as I read the article. One was what I’ll call my “social expectation” track – how I thought I was supposed to feel. In this track I felt pity for a man cut down prematurely from a heart attack, for his wife and daughters left behind. The second track, and by far the stronger, was envy. As I read his obituary, I noted he was both younger and more accomplished than me. He had written several best selling works, had appeared on national television, and had a private practice in a wealthy area with what I immediately assumed to be full-fee, private pay clients.
My envy track started sniffing for a hole in this otherwise glorious life. His books were best sellers – they probably weren’t that deep. I had never read them and I wasn’t about to increase his Amazon ranking by buying them now. Yes, he had appeared on Oprah, but maybe he was just a publicity hound? Maybe he had multiple divorces? No, the article said he had a long term marriage and two teenage daughters. He even had way more hair than I did and was better looking by any standard. As I put down the paper in exasperation, I distinctly remember a voice in my head saying, with a kind of sneering satisfaction: “Well, he’s dead and I’m not.”
This anecdote is not unusual for me when I let myself pay attention honestly to my internal reactions to other people’s success. It contains within it key elements we will be looking at in this series I'm planning on the spirituality of envy:
(1) Envy doesn’t appear to have any rational basis. This man’s death did not help me any more than his success hurt me;
(2) We envy those who are more like us. If this man was a prominent painter or scientist, or even a psychologist who lived thousands of miles away, my envy would not have been triggered so strongly;
(3) Envy is often accompanied by schadenfreude, a German word for which there is no English equivalent, but which means taking pleasure in another person’s misfortune (Schaden=damage, Freude=joy);
(4) Envy is shameful. Do you think it is easy to acknowledge these feelings so baldly? It is only because I think I need to practice what I teach that I am being so up front about my envy.
I would like to propose that envy is the Achilles heel of our ego. We typically think of an Achilles heel as a weak spot which must be protected at all costs because it is the one way in which we may be brought low. But I believe it is precisely this weakness and vulnerability which, if explored with compassion and self awareness, can afford us a window into self understanding which is not otherwise available in the self protective survival suits with which we march out to meet the world each day. Envy is our reminder of how fragile we actually feel in the world at large. Why can she do that and I can't? Why does he get that and I don't? What does their having that mean about me?
Envy is that place where the chink in our self protection allows us the vulnerability necessary for the light of new understanding to break through the defensive structure of our ego. Rather than block it with more defensive maneuvers, why not learn from what our envy is trying to teach us?
Many of us have not been taught or had modeled the process by which looking in to our darkest fears and opening ourselves to our deepest doubts yield the rich fruit of self knowledge and the heightened sense of self and security which come with that. I believe that envy is such a door to our personal underworld. Rather than shunning this door for fear of where it will lead, I suggest we learn to open it to explore the riches awaiting us on the other side.
