The Crippling Power of Envy
And why everyone should learn to let it go.
Envy is a thing so pervasive in our culture that one could argue that it is the character upon which the USA was built.
Remember that “American Dream” of keeping up with the Jones’s?
Let’s be honest, no one was trying to “keep up” with their integrity. That would have evolved much better for our country, to be sure. In the classic American Dream, everyone chases after everyone else’s material wealth.
We were birthed out of a state of envy.
2.5 kids, lamp posts, picket fences.
Suburbia.
This was the ultimate measure of success. Now humanity is facing its own demise because we couldn’t learn how to be comfortable in our own skin, we spent decades endeavoring to figure out how to live in someone else’s.
Envy is a very complicated, multidimensional quality.
I’d like to take a stab at getting to the source of envy and find out how we can work our way out of it, lest we completely, blindly walk off the existential cliff.
Metta, Loving Kindness
I wake up and meditate every morning after my 5am alarm. Currently, I am using Sam Harris’s Waking Up meditation app.
This morning’s meditation was about using Metta or “Loving Kindness” to genuinely wish someone well. Loving Kindness is a practice of meditating on someone else’s happiness, their freedom from suffering, and their inner peace.
During one point of the meditation, Sam stated that having Loving Kindness is the perfect opposite of envy.
A sudden light came into my life when he said this one, simple sentence.
I suddenly saw the many layers of envy and how it pervades so much of our human energy. It’s a toxicity that, if cured, could truly set freedom in motion and open up countless doors for our collective future.
So, what is envy?
Before diving into the qualities of envy, it’s important to define what envy is not.
Wishing better for yourself is NOT the same as envy.
People who wish better for themselves and for their family are not applying envy to their lives. In fact, once you truly experience Loving Kindness, you will come to see that wishing better for oneself or anyone else is the absolute opposite of envy.
If you’ve been paying attention to current events, you may have noticed that there are waves of activists rising up to promote more equity within our culture. This too, should not be confused with envy.
People of color, women, and the poor & downtrodden in society are not envious of wealthy, opportunity abundant white men. The movement of equity is not about wishing everyone was a white man, it’s about recognizing that a toxicity of white privilege exists and that it creates a stark and dangerous imbalance within our society.
If white people, particularly men, want to be helpful in correcting this imbalance, the task is to implement Loving Kindness in both idea and practice.
What do I mean by idea and practice?
“When we practice loving kindness and compassion, we are the first ones to profit.” ~Rumi
The easiest way to implement the idea of Loving Kindness in your life is to meditate on it. The Waking Up App is a truly great way to get started. There is an entire section of the app dedicated to meditating on the idea of Loving Kindness.
The modality is to sit and think about someone in your life (or a group of people) whom you wish to be well, to be free from suffering, and to be at peace. Having the idea that someone is well and free from suffering creates such incredible and powerful space for compassion to come into your life. This will then, most assuredly, open up opportunities to put Loving Kindness into practice.
In speaking of the practice of Loving Kindness, if you’re in a position of privilege and life has blessed you with an abundance of material wealth, the surest way to practice loving kindness is to share your bounty. In my opinion, the most incredible way to do this is to invest in someone else’s success (other than fellow, privileged white men, of course).
My roommate (a white male) recently got a MasterClass subscription and, out of loving kindness, chose to share his login information with me so that I can watch all the courses on how to become a better writer.
Over the past few days, together, we have been watching Ron Finley teach gardening basics and it is truly mesmerizing. If you have extra money, the best investment advice you’ll ever hear is to pour money into your local community garden.
As Ron says in his MasterClass,
“Everyone should learn how to feed themselves.”
If you have enough money left at the end of the year, lovingly donate it to your nearest city’s urban gardening program, such as the one Ron Finley runs. I am convinced that this investment will be our biggest and fastest way out of the climate crisis.
What is envy?
“…envy is ignorance…imitation is suicide.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Envy is the mirror opposite of compassion and Loving Kindness. Envy is wishing you were living someone else’s experience. It’s wishing you were in someone else’s skin.
In a certain light, envy is the practice of excluding the people in your life who deserve your compassion the most by putting your energy and attention into the people who maybe don’t deserve it. Because of this, envy actually creates separation from people.
Sitting to meditate and using your mental capacity to send love and compassion to other people brings closeness and connection to humanity.
Expending mental energy wishing you were living someone else’s circumstance, having their money or opportunities, creates separation. By its very definition, envy plays on the differences among people, causing deep rifts and isolation.
“Everyone puts their pants on the same way,” my grandmother used to say.
Envy is the precursor to idolizing the uber-wealthy and famous among us, rendering us all ignorant to the simple fact that they do, actually, put their pants on the same way.
Regardless of the square footage in their McMansions, the uber rich and famous are also going down in the same sinking ship of the Sixth Mass Extinction.
When push comes to shove and the climate crisis is really starting to heat up, I guarantee you’ll be wishing you had learned how to grow your own food instead of stock trading your life away so that you can buy a bigger boat.
Envy comes out of a scarcity mindset and leads to exploitation.
“Never underestimate the power of jealousy and the power of envy to destroy.” ~Oliver Stone
As you can see so beautifully displayed in Ron Finley’s MasterClass, anyone who as their own garden, knows that there is no limit to nature’s abundance.
Contrary to the principle of abundance, Capitalism’s closest ally: scarcity, is a concept that plays on fear. Capitalism’s model was built on the schizophrenic notion that some win only because some have to lose. This lead to the institution of hierarchy.
Envy plays directly on the toxic belief in hierarchy. Putting envy into practice means that you have to claw your way into a top tier position in order to succeed.
In her book, The Creation of Patriarchy, the mother of historical feminism: Gerda Lerner, finds that the commonality for nearly all ancient patriarchal tribal nations was in their creation of an agriculture system.
Through one patriarchal tribe at a time, humanity started adopting a scarcity mindset. Out of this mindset and the fear it produces, exploitation of the earth became a new, pervasive normal, clawing its way across continents.
Scarcity. Exploitation. Hierarchy. Envy.
All of these qualities are the mirror opposite of compassion. They are the opposite of life.
The New American Dream
Having 2.5 kids in Suburbia may have been the American Dream at one point but the devolution of this dream is upon us and it’s past time for our collective conscience to begin waking up.
We must actualize a renewed connection to humanity and to the earth. We must give-up, rather than give-in to, envy and isolation.
We survive the impending climate crisis through cooperation, not exploitation. As we have so plainly seen for centuries, exploitation can only lead to death.
It’s time to create a new vision for our world, to lay our envious, lesser selves to rest and birth a movement of compassion.
My American Dream is to see a garden growing on every street corner.
What’s yours?
Thank you for giving me your time and attention! If you loved what you read and want to contribute to my “coffee fund,” feel free donate to my Ko-fi page! 100% of the proceeds go directly to yours truly and are guaranteed to make me smile.
Thanks!
In hope & gratitude,
Lydia Catherine
