Envy

Got me a lot of flaws. If you didn't know that already, you will soon - unless you're the sort that figures it's a general fact about humanity and therefore already an assumed fact, in which case, yes, you're very smart, shut up.

Sarcasm. Definitely a major flaw. But not tonight's subject. As the title might have given away, it's envy.

Mark Twain once said, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Fortunately for you, I had time today to write something shorter than it would have otherwise been. One of my other faults is digression, for reasons I shall not digress here to discuss. Just be relieved that great mounds of diluting words got excised from this.

It used to be that envy was considered a bad thing. A deadly sin. Now it's practically enshrined by any number of groups and social mores, all of which exist to help shift the perceived source of the problem from an internal one to an external one. In other words, trying to tear down something good rather than facing one's own failings. A very energetic form of laziness, it'd seem. And oh, the justifications given! But they all have something in common, a crack that prevents them holding up in the light of reality:

Envy comes from a mindset of poverty, of scarcity. Of ignorance.

Sometimes it is supported by a knowledge, somewhere inside, that the lack one experiences is entirely optional. It is not the case everywhere, but in America, long-term poverty in adults is almost always the result of either behavioral issues or serious mental illness. I see this regularly; a friend who runs a homeless ministry sees it daily. It's not the homeless that get all het up about the wealth of the ultra-elite, though, or of people just higher in the socio-economic ladder. It's people at the bottom of the middle class, mostly, who are eaten up with envy, and I strongly suspect it's because of the scarcity mindset on the surface with some strong denial running beneath it.

I suspect this because it's what I see in myself, in my own envy. I can look at people who have done well and wish I had planned and done better. I can look at those who are more fit, enjoying its many perks, and know that many bad choices made the divergence between us, and that many hard choices lie between me and those benefits. Envy comes easily at those moments. It's disgusting. If let to fester, it's horribly self-destructive.

What if it can be turned to better use, though? Energy can be directed: why not redirect a desire for a better life? The first thing to do is to kill the denial. That's all this article really is. Once acknowledged, it cannot be maintained, so into the light it comes. I have to recognize that where I am is in no small part due to my own decisions, and the bad decisions are mostly due to looking for the easy, quickly pleasant route. The hard choices lead to an immeasurably more pleasurable existence, and knowing that will help sustain me. I've no illusions that self-discipline will suddenly spring to me after all these years of struggling with it. But recognizing the need to change will allow the change itself.

Then there's the envy itself, the scarcity mentality that causes so much grief. If I recognize that wealth of all kinds is, in truth, created, not taken - and if taken, it makes it less, as history has shown endlessly - then I can learn from those who have gained more than me, have achieved better freedoms, or whatever goals I deem worthy. If I consciously understand that their wealth does me no harm, and reject that childish view, will it destroy my drive to excel? No, it will ennoble it.

The end result of all this is very nearly the opposite of the trouble described above.

The difference is that I consider envy a failing, and something to motivate me. They consider envy a virtue to be lauded, and a rationale for political action.