Long ago, in the olden days when people watched movies on V.H.S. tapes and traveled in stegosaurus-drawn wagons, and I was a child, one of my favorite tapes came with a preview for a movie I didn’t own and had never seen. I must have regarded a preview as an unskippable part of the tape-watching experience, because even though I found this clip terrifying, I nevertheless watched it every time. It was about twin sisters, one of whom hated the other, even dreaming about beating her sister to death with a shovel. In one scene, the two girls sat in church as a preacher condemned “hate.” As he growled, “God shall damn the haters, and condemn them to eternal night,” black curtains fell over the stained-glass windows. This moment proved indelible: I could recall it easily decades later. It wasn’t just that it scared me. It was the sense that you really could block the light out, that this was a choice you could make, even if you didn’t understand until it was too late.
The movie I never did see, but I did read the book on which it was based, Jacob Have I Loved, by Katherine Paterson (better known for the classic children’s tearjerker Bridge to Terabithia). Paterson’s title comes from a passage in Romans, which is flung in the face of the heroine, Sara Louise, by her dementia-addled grandmother: “Romans nine thirteen . . . ‘As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.’” Sara Louise looks this passage up in the Bible to discover that the voice here is not Isaac’s, nor Rachel’s, but God’s:
I was shaking all over as I closed the book and got back under the covers. There was, then, no use struggling or even trying. It was God himself who hated me. And without cause. “Therefore,” verse eighteen had gone on to rub it in, “hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.” God had chosen to hate me. And if my heart was hard, that was his doing as well.
Sara Louise and her twin sister Caroline grow up in a poor island fishing community. The community is barely surviving, not only because fishing is a difficult business but because the island is eroding and growing smaller every year. Sara Louise, “the elder by a few minutes,” comments that this brief span “represented the only time in my life when I was the center of everyone’s attention. From the moment Caroline was born, she snatched it all for herself.” At birth, Caroline is a fragile child who requires a lot of care, whereas Sara Louise is healthy and safe to neglect. As they grow older, Caroline displays exceptional musical talent, but Sara Louise has no comparable gift. Needless to say, Caroline is beautiful, while Sara Louise is just there. “She was so sure, so present, so easy, so light and gold,” Sara Louise broods, “while I was all gray and shadow. I was not ugly or monstrous. That might have been better. Monsters always command attention, if only for their freakishness.”
Caroline’s musical gifts eventually grant her what she and Sara Louise both desperately want—a ticket off the island to a better, bigger life. Consumed with rage, Sara Louise rejects her parents’ offer to try to send her to a better school and instead drops out to work on her father’s fishing boat. Caroline even marries the childhood friend whom Sara Louise had always assumed she herself would marry. Feeling trapped on the island with no future and no escape, doomed to take care of her parents until she becomes an elderly oddity nobody has to care for, Sara Louise screams at her mother: “Oh, Caroline. . . . Everything’s always been for Caroline. Caroline the delicate, the gifted, the beautiful. Of course, we must all sacrifice our lives to give her greatness to the world!” Sara Louise’s feelings are not exactly wrong, but they are also not exactly right. The special treatment is real, but her overwhelming sense that every good thing in Caroline’s life has come at her own expense is not. What has come at her expense, frustrated her efforts, and wasted her time is another thing entirely.
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Two fish are two fish, two stones are two stones, two worms are two worms, and two paramecium are actually two paramecia, but two people are three people. There is you, there is me, and there is the unholy ghost. That is, there is you, there is me, and there is whoever’s winning. And, as the line goes: if you protest that you don’t ever think about who’s winning, that’s because it’s you.
Well, maybe not. The ghost is not always and only unholy. There are other things that can come from the associations of two people: love, for instance. In the throes of keeping score, tallying up imaginary slights and equally imaginary victories, however, you cannot imagine relating to other people in a different way. In Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Snow Queen,” a boy named Kay is infected by a piece of cursed glass falling into his eye. “Everything good and beautiful,” Andersen writes, “seemed to dwindle to almost nothing at all, while everything that was worthless and ugly became most conspicuous and even uglier than ever.” This vice, this pain over the good fortune of others and a corresponding pleasure over their misfortunes, we call various names—sour grapes, spite, resentment—all of which capture some aspect of the experience. Its proper name, though, is envy.
Envy is often used synonymously with jealousy, but jealousy, in its strict sense, is a simpler feeling. Jealousy has to do with things you have and not wanting to lose them. Envy has to do with things you don’t have and wanting others not to have them, sometimes more than simply wanting them for yourself. A jealous person might be afraid of somebody “stealing” their romantic partner, but an envious person might want that partner for no reason other than that somebody else did first. Jealousy is anxious. Envy is resentful. Jealousy is Othello’s vice. Envy is Iago’s. Jealousy is a nasty vice, but not so hard to overcome, because sadness over the loss of something precious to us is a reasonable feeling. As an intellectual matter, you can decide not to be jealous and, with time, bring your feelings into line with that decision. Envy is subtler; it compromises our judgements and our aspirations, shrinking and distorting our interior world as well as our sense of the world around us. If you’ve ever been in the throes of envy but successfully shaken it off, its perspective looks like insanity. How could you have ever thought about the world that way?
Give it a minute. In Andersen’s tale, to wash away the poisoned glass requires a superlative act of love, but then it is gone, and its effects are ended. Outside of stories, our lives are less conducive to healing climax: if you are prone to envy, you might think you’ve thoroughly weeded it from yourself, but it can regrow itself from a single overlooked root. Something will happen; let’s say you hear about bad news from somebody you’ve always thought of as a rival. It’s nothing seriously bad, of course; you’re not a monster. We’re talking stubbed toes, not broken legs. You, member of Envy Anonymous that you are, might be alarmed to feel a brief flicker of warmth. Disavowed as soon as felt, sure; it’s still true that the first feeling you have, faced with someone’s troubles, is, however brief, a rush of glory.
Like vanity, envy is a vice of mirrors; you see yourself reflected in everything. In “The Snow Queen,” the shard of glass that enters Kay’s eye comes from a broken mirror made by devils that makes everything ugly; in “The Two Trees,” Yeats counsels his beloved to avoid
The glass of outer weariness
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat.
These mirrors are not like vanity’s in one crucial aspect: if you look in the mirror with total satisfaction, you might be vain, but you envy no one. Envy’s mirror reflects your self in terms of what you are not. You don’t want your own reflection; you want somebody else’s. Unlike other sins, which can be at least momentarily appeased, nothing satisfies envy. There’s no change, no acquisition, and no achievement that will quiet its desires, because the moment something is yours, it’s worthless.
As with any vice, envy becomes a problem when brief involuntary impulses are deliberately cultivated and fed. There are spheres where life truly is zero sum; regret over loss is natural. The problem comes when that feeling is encouraged. One of the things we know about Judas, beyond his eventual betrayal, was that he saw evil in everything done by others. He demanded to know why an expensive oil was used to wash Christ’s feet rather than being sold and the proceeds given to the poor. In terms of what he says, Judas is no different from many holy people. But he is not sincere, and his lack of sincerity, as well as his desire to diminish another’s act of worship, is what turns his objection from a principled love of the poor into an expression of envy.
Envy’s mirror is often a sibling, since, in theory, a sibling has everything you have: the same parents, the same childhood. If your sibling is therefore doing better than you are in life, such success can feel like a personal rebuke. Elder children, perhaps because they feel as if there is something that ought to be theirs by right of coming first, are usually the envious ones. In the Bible, there are Cain and Abel, Joseph and his brothers, the obedient son and the prodigal son. In the folk ballad “The Two Sisters,” the elder sister kills the younger out of envy, usually because the younger is loved by a man the elder wants for herself (“Their hevin of luve of spyte was her hell,” one version goes).
Even things which do not make sense as objects of envy can become so. To choose one example from real life, Cary Stayner was the older brother of Steven Stayner, a seven-year-old boy who was kidnapped by a pedophile in 1972. Seven years later, Steven escaped and returned to his family. In 1989, their story was turned into a successful television movie, I Know My First Name Is Steven. (Steven would die in an accident that same year.) Cary went on to murder multiple women in Yosemite Park; after his arrest, he expressed interest in having his own crimes turned into a movie. It seems incredible that somebody could envy their brother for the experience of being kidnapped and sexually abused for seven years, let alone that such envy could re-awaken years later. Yet it’s plain that Cary did envy his brother for the importance and attention his kidnapping had conferred upon him, and that this envy survived long after Steven’s death.
Sara Louise’s dreaded Jacob and Esau do not exactly fit the pattern. Jacob, the envious younger twin, schemes to defraud his brother, succeeds, and is rewarded for it. What makes Jacob different from Cain or Joseph’s brothers? Why does his determination to take away his brother’s inheritance not condemn him? The answer seems to be the arbitrary favor of God: God loves Jacob, God hates Esau, and that’s how it is. No doubt several generations of theologians have embroidered God’s stated hatred of Esau until it has become less disturbing, but how many are really soothed?
Still, the same instinct that makes Jacob cheat his brother is the one that leads him to wrestle with the angel and demand a blessing. Envy, among its many other destructive effects, has a tendency to keep people stuck in the same place. Perhaps the vice Esau ought to represent to us is pride; he complacently assumes that what’s coming to him always will be there, and even when he trades his birthright for lentils, he doesn’t think that he has made a real commitment. He cannot imagine the threat of a wilier, hungrier brother.
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One great challenge for members of Envy Anonymous is that there’s a lot of money in envy; not for them but for others. All vices are moneymakers. The snack food industry has figured out how to create foods that just make you feel hungrier, the pornography industry has figured out how to create lust it cannot satiate, and social media feeds have even figured out how to monetize sloth by making it easier just to keep watching short clips of people pulling off impressive but stupid feats, like clog dancing on a skateboard.
Advertising is the envy industry. You make people feel like losers and offer them the cure. Even knowing this trick in advance doesn’t really protect the audience, because the ways in which you can make people feel like losers are numberless. There are many kinds of insufficiency to prey upon: the fear of being left out of what everybody’s doing and the fear of doing what everybody else is doing are both levers that clever advertisers can pull at the same time if they want. Fear of being wrong in some basic way that you alone cannot notice, fear of putting others off because you lack some magic product, fear of losing out on love because you used inferior toothpaste—the list goes on.
In its most basic form, though, an advertisement gives you something to want in comparison to your pathetic daily self. Here is a picture of a glamorous woman in a jacket, an arm thrown around her man. There’s that implicit question: What has she got that you haven’t got? Well, she has a bottle of Chanel No. 19—“Witty. Confident. Devastatingly feminine. . . . The Outspoken Chanel”—and that’s a problem you can solve for the low, low price of a couple hundred dollars. (“Aren’t you curious about a fragrance with that kind of style?”)
The high-gloss advertisement of yesteryear is child’s play compared with what advertisers have at their disposal now. Today, there are people who have turned themselves into walking, talking product placements: everything they do is designed to get an audience to click on an affiliate link. The kind of sponsorships that have taken over sports now can also apply to a Midwestern mother, a young adult showcasing a day in the life of a product manager, or a couple that has acquired an unusually charming parrot. The logic is sound, to an extent—these companies are making money off of us anyway, so why shouldn’t somebody else skim a little off the top? There’s nothing so wrong about recommending a shampoo to a friend; why not also several thousand or a million strangers? Should they suffer imperfectly cleansed hair forever, simply because they don’t know you? And if you get a little percentage of those sales, does that make your recommendations therefore worthless or insincere?
What these social media accounts monetize is not any particular product; it’s envy. Envy is why thousands of women will follow the every move of some other woman on TikTok they all claim to despise and buy the products she sells or brands with her own name. The only thing that can sometimes assuage envy for this kind of person is the sense of being yourself enviable, and so the more people see apparently average peers hawking products online, the more they want to be in that position themselves. That numerous movies, pop songs, and memoirs attest to the fact that the experience of being the target of mass envy is not pleasant deters no one from seeking to be on the other side.
What have they got that you haven’t got? is the question every time you open up any of the many ways modern society has supplied you with a number by which you can compare yourself to others. It’s terribly unfair, whatever the answer, but you know what they say: don’t get mad, get even. Why not you? Why shouldn’t you be the lucky one, for once? Why can’t it be you, just one time? Everywhere you look, you see smiling people who got lucky, who won big on a gambling app or switched to some new and indefinably better brand of deodorant, and you can hate them but you can also be them. You can download the app, you can buy the deodorant, you can keep on trying to make sure that they haven’t got something you haven’t got. And if these choices don’t work out for you, if the gap between your life as it is and your life as it’s sold keeps widening, all that there is left to do is to fix your eyes on the gap and watch as everything you thought you valued about your own life slides worthlessly into darkness. Like—well—like a black curtain sliding over a stained-glass window.
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In Jacob Have I Loved, Sara Louise begins to shed her envy when she’s asked, point blank, what she wants out of her life. What’s the big thing Caroline has taken away from her? She doesn’t have an answer. She has never even really thought about it. She has never even said she wants to leave the island. The person who has been keeping Sara Louise back, doomed to labor under the shadow of Caroline, doomed to waste her life simply because she was born a little less special, is just herself. Realizing that doesn’t fix Sara Louise overnight; even at the end of the book her relationship with her sister is friendly only from a long distance. But realizing that she does not have an answer when asked what she wants to do with her life is the cold shock that sets her on her way to getting better.
One temptation, in trying to cure oneself of envy, is to try to abandon both judgement and aspiration, since envy lives in both. Only then, by refusing to want, can we know that we operate from a pure heart. There are spiritual practices meant to encourage such abnegations—for Catholics, for instance, there is a prayer called the Litany of Humility. The first part of the litany, in which one prays for deliverance from the desire of being praised or the fear of being despised, is simple enough. In the second part of the litany, however, you are meant to pray that others may be loved more than yourself, holier than yourself, chosen where you are set aside, or preferred to you in everything. That is where the rubber meets the road; I at least cannot even pretend to aspire to any of these outcomes. I would like very much to be humble in my spirit, while successful in my deeds and preferred to my peers—just as I would like to be poor in spirit, provided it comes with being rich in the flesh.
For people such as myself, attempting to disavow judgement and aspiration entirely is dangerous; we run the risk of being like the man who rids himself of one devil only to play host to seven more. It is easy to act self-effacingly, but if there is no real internal reform, every smile becomes another addition to a great pile of resentment.
For hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère—surely you understand by now that in this affair, you are me and I am you. I write from inside the beast. That’s why I know it so well. I have greatly envied, and been greatly envied, and can’t recommend either experience. But I’ve learned one thing through my mistakes, and I’ll share it with you now: the real secret to beating envy is to realize that envy, in addition to being a great vice and an internal poison, is a drag. It is boring. Imagine, if you will, being summoned up to the great throne of God and experiencing a supercut of every time you’ve envied another person. I don’t think it would just feel like shame; it would be overwhelmingly monotonous, like listening to a monologue from the most tiresome person ever to be born, a mosquito-buzz of why not me what makes them so great why them why not me what makes them so great why them why not me what makes them so going on and on and on. And when I imagine that, I get over myself. Not forever, but for a while. Envy will resist self-laceration, but it’s vulnerable to laughter.
