All the people I'm jealous of
What to do with all those jealous thoughts whenever they creep in
The following is an abbreviated list of all the people I’m jealous of at various times and for various reasons.
Founders whose companies earn $1 million or more per year
Substacks with more subscribers than us
People who are good at making social media videos
The professional dancers on Dancing With the Stars
Taylor Swift
People who live in metropolitan cities where Taylor Swift has concerts
People who live near an IKEA
People who live in the big house on the hillside that overlooks my house
People who own castles in France
Retired people
People with passive income
Guests on podcasts that I want to be on
Whoever did the marketing for the Barbie movie
Whoever owns the bonfire.com domain name
The creators of the Lego Movie franchise
Professional artists
Professional writers
Professional musicians
Salespeople (only when I am on a call with a client and need to make a sale)
People who are good at saying no
Superheroes, particularly with powers of flight and/or time travel
Anyone with a strong GIF game
TED Talkers
The person who creates the Connections puzzle every day
People who complete the Connections puzzle on days when I cannot
What’s the deal with jealousy?
Technically, you might say that I am envious of all these people because they have something that I want. Jealousy, by contrast, is feeling threatened that someone might take what I have. It’s an almost imperceptible nuance … and rather moot since I feel both emotions, often at the same time!
Jealousy and envy both involve a feeling of desire for what another person has. As you can see from the above list, this definitely rings true for me as a primary trigger. Some days, I wake up and count my blessings. Other days, I wake up and let the comparison games begin.
Some days—the majority of days, I’m proud to say—I’m unbothered by what others are doing, knowing that things are good, Bonfire is great, it’s a wonderful life with no board of investors to answer to, no revenue goals that double every quarter, no OKRs. And then other days, I wake up and purposefully avoid LinkedIn because I don’t want to end up in a spiral having seen yet another post about how someone grew their business to seven figures in just seven months … while traveling the world and eating keto and getting their pilot’s license.
Jealousy typically rears its head in a few common ways:
Success
Money
Relationships
Freedom
Notoriety
Possessions
And underneath the surface it is driven by a few common factors:
Fear
Insecurity
Unrealistic expectations
Lack of communication or context
Past experiences
How much of this rings true for you?
I can check pretty much every one of the above boxes at various points in time. In particular, I find that when I’m doing creative work I’m particularly susceptible to feeling jealous over notoriety, freedom, and success while dealing with my own insecurities and unrealistic expectations.
Creativity & inspiration, née jealousy
It is normal to feel jealous.
(I mostly wrote the above note for myself. Everyone feels jealous at some point. Phew.)
Especially for us creative folks, we are constantly opened up to a variety of influences, on purpose, so that we can be inspired and filled and collaborative. Very often, this path of inspiration can lead down side alleys of jealousy: people achieving acclaim or attention that we hope to get some day; people having access to resources that we long for; people having freedom and flexibility that has so far eluded us.
Re-branding jealousy and envy into a positive form of inspiration and motivation is one of the best methods for channeling some positive vibes into an otherwise negative affair.
There’s even some scientific research to back this up.
What is the evolutionary psychology behind why we feel envy and jealousy? A group of researchers studied this very question and found that inspiration may be the secret ingredient as to why jealousy persisted for all these years.
The researchers surveyed a number of respondents with a series of questions like:
Are you more envious of: (A) someone who is similar to you in most respects but is a bit wealthier (say 50% wealthier) or (B) more envious of Bill Gates?
Logically, you would think that you’d be more envious of the person with the most wealth. But the vast majority people were envious of the wealthier people who were more like them. The reason being: their envy was a motivating factor.
Envy evolved to motivate access to resources that are in demand by others in your group. … My brain quickly computes that in all likelihood the very rich Gates is either deservedly much richer (i.e., he is far smarter), or just extremely lucky. Evolutionarily speaking, there is no point in being jealous of him because he is “off scale” either in ability or luck, so no amount of effort by me can result in reaching his level of prosperity; envy would motivate an inappropriate and futile waste of resources. The richer peer, on the other hand, may be only slightly smarter, luckier, or more hardworking than me, so there is some chance, at least, that envy might motivate me to exceed his access to resources (or jealousy might make me steal it away from him with impunity).
I’m obviously not advocating for anyone to steal with impunity, but the other part about being motivation most certainly rings true!
How I live with my envy and jealousy
What does one do with all this jealousy?
If everyone has it and if it’s baked into our evolutionary DNA, then there must be—hopefully—some ways to deal with it. Like most emotional things, my process has been a journey, and it is far from complete. But along the way I’ve found a few techniques that have helped me reframe my perspective and learn to live with all these complicated feelings.
1 - Remind myself that it is not all zero-sum
Zero sum thinking is the notion that one person’s gain is another person’s loss. For instance, in my world it may be the idea that there is a finite pool of success out there and anytime someone has some it means I get less.
But you know what? That’s not the way the world works!
The world is full of gray and spectrums and infinite amounts of success in all shapes and sizes. I do not need to fear scarcity of the good things in life. Not only does this make me relax, it also helps me cheer for others anytime good things come their way. And what a wonderful community spirit that can be!
2 - Remind myself of all the good, amazing, wonderful things I have
Gratitude journaling might be one of humankind’s greatest inventions. I do not keep a physical gratitude journal—I am, ashamedly, sometimes jealous of those with the determination and handwriting to do so—but I do regularly return to mindful practices of noticing all the good things I have in life and being grateful for all the opportunities, resources, friends, family, and fortune that I’ve been lucky enough to receive.
This sure puts jealousy in its place!
I’m never antagonistic toward the jealous feelings when they flit across my brain. I see them, I label them, I listen to them and try to understand where they’re coming from. Then I use them as a reminder to turn the page gratitude.
3 - Empathize
One of the quickest ways to stop my envy train in its tracks is when I pause in the midst of my envy to recognize that other people may be envying me (!!) or that the people I’m envying have their own targets of envy (!?). This puts it all in a new perspective. I am not the only one who might long for something I don’t have, and I have much more than I might even realize.
Related to this idea of universal comparison, I love this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye that acknowledges just how great you and I already are and how others may perceive us:
The river is famous to the fish. The loud voice is famous to silence, which knew it would inherit the earth before anybody said so. The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds watching him from the birdhouse. The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek. The idea you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosom. The boot is famous to the earth, more famous than the dress shoe, which is famous only to floors. The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it and not at all famous to the one who is pictured. I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing streets, sticky children in grocery lines, famous as the one who smiled back. I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.
Over to you
What do you do when jealousy strikes? How have you learned to balance your envy and jealousy and maybe even harness them for good? I’d love to know your tips and tricks!
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I envy (and am inspired by) people who have the courage to build their business in the way that aligns with their values and beliefs. Ryan Holiday is one of them :)
AAAAAH This post was SO GOOD and so timely for me and my little envy struggle bus over here.