Envy Today

All of the traditional seven deadly Christian sins seem rampant today, although perhaps no more than they ever were.  Envy certainly remains pernicious and ubiquitous in American society.  It is encountered in the writings on grand ideas, in public discussions, in private conversations.  And in myself.  It is an unavoidable undertone in our culture.

For example, the poor envy the rich, nominally for their wealth and possessions but implicitly for the way they seem to be in control of their lives.  The rich, surprisingly, envy the poor because  they feel they do not have to work nor undergo the constant pressures on the upper class, and of course because they are expected to help contribute to the support of those poor.  The healthy are envied by the sick, and even the lame are often envied by the healthy for the “special favors” they receive from the common resources.  Worse than that, envy is a sin of comparison, and the group to whom you wish to compare yourself is selected by you.  A person with more prestige and power than ninety percent of everyone may still envy all of those to whom she compares herself _ ignoring the rest entirely.

This is somewhat the result of our myth that anyone can be anything.  All one must do to succeed is to work hard and work smart.  Anyone has a niche that is grand, if they only seek it diligently.   On the other hand, anyone who cannot succeed on such terms is considered a failure to society and the self.  But since, from their standpoint, they tried as hard as they could _ well what is left but to envy the “winners.”

Life is mostly a lottery.  I didn’t get to choose my birth, or genes, or heritage.  I don’t have much influence over my death.  Perhaps my talents, if any, fit no existing niche _ a born general in a time of peace.  It remains true that fortune favors the prepared, but many of those most prepared never encounter significant fortune.  Thus I may envy those luckier than I am.

As Dante illustrated, the worst aspect of the classic sins is that they are internally corrosive.  Each day and each moment for each of us unfolds with no comparative reference to other people.  As the song says, we should live, laugh, love and be happy.  In fact, not only should we strive to avoid envy, but we should develop pity for those consumed by it.

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I am short and nearsighted, so I could never be an NFL wide receiver or an airline pilot.  Other jobs turned out not to pay so well.  No relative handed me a company to run.  It soon became clear that I couldn’t “be anything I wanted.”
 

Then they said, well, “within reason,” which meant finding an appropriate niche and working hard.  But I soon discovered that no matter what the niche, the most ruthless always became the rulers.  The best at selling lies (including to themselves) were the most well rewarded.  My personality was lacking to excel at either.  They told me to change _ a kind of metaphysical destruction of my personality _  but even there I found that was difficult.  I was handicapped by who I was and unlikely to catch up to the naturals even if tried hard _ just as extra workouts could never make me a wide receiver.
 

Eventually, I did find my place, where I made an adequate living at a reasonable career and found happiness in the rest of my life.  I worked really hard _ it seems to me everyone generally works really hard _ but some get a lot more reward for the same amount of effort.  I can’t help sometimes envying those born with a silver spoon.

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Hot Dog

Oh, I wish I were somebody else entirely
With health and wealth and notoriety
‘Cause if I just had what that other guy has
The universe would be in love with me

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I expect you want me to suggest how you should banish, or at least handle, envy, but I can’t do that.  You will make your own mistakes, as I continue to make mine, and you will work out your own struggles with who you should be.  You are not me, and your subjective universe is totally different than the one I inhabit.  All I ask is that you sometimes reflect on the role of envy in your outlook, for sometimes  attitudes can distort your vision without your being aware of them.

You need to work and plan and follow a purpose, and in that journey some envy giving you a direction to follow can be a good roadmap.  If you do not let it fall into hopeless excuses, envy can help provide a set of concrete goals in life.  But, like driving at night, keep in mind that the most near and the most accessible are the most important and the most useful.  Envy of the most distant and unattainable will simply lead to frustration.

Remember, in that regard, that those telling you of cosmic purpose, whom you perhaps envy for their clear decisive position, are somewhat suspect.  Like anyone telling you what you should do in anything else, the most obvious are also the most powerful and the most persuasive _ the rulers and the salesmen.  Which is to say that they are the ruthless and the liars, whose main purpose is to keep you content  (or at least accepting) so that they can remain on top.  There is little need to envy an empty soul.
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Envy, like all the sins, is an internal phenomenon.  No overt acts are involved, and there is no crime committed.  Envy can be the motivation for overt acts and crimes, but in itself is only something in our mind, like the taste of chocolate.

Envy is also only destructive at extremes.  To eliminate it is to become less than human.  Like all other human characteristics, it plays a useful part in who we are, and is a part of the beautiful ecology of our internal consciousness.  The problem is when it becomes rampant, when it corrosively overcomes all the rest of the environment of our minds and drives us into areas which our reason and other human characteristics restrain.  Envy is a sin only as it blinds us to the alternate _ and more likely _ possibilities of the patterns we are trying to discover about us.

The worst consequence is that we become easy to predict and manipulate by others, who learn to fully predict what will control us, even without our knowledge.  That is not the real sin, of course, but it is a practical result that makes us less able to shape our worlds to our needs.  And there is nobody more helpless than someone who cannot themselves understand the levers by which they are easily worked.

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The ant and the grasshopper became friends as the warm summer stretched along, and would meet over a beer every week at the Meadow Tavern.

“Oh, I envy you, grasshopper,” said the ant.  “You sing and play all day long without a care in the world, sitting and flying and wooing the ladies and just enjoying life.  I wish I could be more like you.”

“Well, ant,” replied the grasshopper, “actually I often envy you.  You have a strong purpose to your life and are always building for the future while I have nothing to show for my days but shadows and memories.  In these longer nights, I am sometimes frightened by the emptiness.”

The first frost inevitably came along, and grasshopper died as expected, penniless and with no other legacy than an empty husk in the dust.  A few weeks later, a freak hurricane, driven by global warming, came along and destroyed the ants nest, drowning them all.  Catastrophes envy nobody.
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As a kid, I attended church every Sunday and paid attention to the sermons.  Sermons are an interesting device, when squirming on a hard pew, to focus the mind on some particular aspect of life.  Usually they centered on some topic from the bible, and cruised off from there.  It is at times an extremely profitable way of thinking, and one often too lost in this world of instant connections and virtual everywhere at once.

I have tried to regain the habit, now that I have the time, to attempt much the same thing fairly often.  Take a simple word, or a single concept, and let it play out, recoil, investigate the nooks and crannies called into consciousness, explore it from one side and another.  I do this not to change my outlook, nor to encounter revelations, nor even to improve my prospects for the future, but simply for the joy of it, as another way to encounter the world in all its fullness.  We have the miracle of infinite consciousness, but only to the extent we sometimes exercise it to its fullest capacity, which can be done by straining at trying to understand the apparently simplest things as well as the most complex.