Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we break down the psychology of your 20s.
Recently, I've been thinking quite a bit about Envy and all the ways in which many of us in our 20s, myself included, never seem to be satisfied with what we have or in some ways in constant competition with those around us who we perceive as being more accomplished, happier, more successful, maybe
more materially blessed.
It is such a mental trap to constantly be feeling not just inferior but this like really intense sense of jealousy or longing for more and using other people as fuel for that insecurity.
Feeling like maybe they haven't worked as hard as us, that you deserve the life that they have, that it's unfair.
And you know what? I'll admit part of my fascination with this at the moment is because I've been feeling a lot of envy recently, envy that I think is wrongly placed and causing me a lot of satisfaction.
And I think that envy is not a bad emotion if you take time to examine it.
It's also one of those emotions that we rarely want to admit or reveal to other people or subconsciously to ourselves, but I think it's really important too.
And it's interesting because I think we can feel envious about almost anything about somebody's body, their clothes, their social status of someone's relationship, you know your friend's dream job or your co -worker's promotion at work.
You might initially feel happy for them, right?
But there's also that pang of pain as if your brain is saying, you know, why don't we have those things?
That resentment I think really stops us from not just appreciating what we have but from celebrating others.
And then on the flip side of our experience of feeling envy is the experience of being envied by someone else.
Maybe you have one of these friends or these people in your life, sometimes it can even be a parent or a family member in some cases who sees what you have and finds you undeserving or themselves more deserving and they envy you for it.
They refuse to celebrate your accomplishments.
They're constantly scrutinizing and judging you, offering fake compliments or you know I think also attempting to compete with you is another huge one.
That is also not a great feeling and I think it's really fascinating because all of us experience this, right?
Every single one of us.
But we never, we so infrequently speak about it because of the shame we feel towards what is at the end of the day a very anti -social emotion, a feeling that is derived primarily from our own insecurities.
And the insecurities that we definitely don't want to admit.
You know to admit our envy is to admit how we truly feel about ourselves which is that we are lacking.
Hence why someone else's successes, accomplishments have the capacity to make us feel so terrible about ourselves.
So I think that that is why I wanted to direct our attention to this today.
We owe it to ourselves to examine not just the origins of our envy but the consequences it has, the why behind envy, and how to I guess get to the point where we are happy and satisfied with what we have without needing to constantly be like someone else.
I think without needing to constantly compare that is true freedom and I think envy and the implicit comparison that comes along with it is such a thief of our joy especially for those of us in our 20s where someone else is always going to appear like they are doing better than you.
We are all at such various different points of our journey.
Some of us are further along, some of us might feel behind but it's not a race.
So I think approaching that dynamic, approaching that nuance in everyone's different trajectory is not actually going to help us, it's going to harm us, it's going to make us resentful people, it's going to make us bitter people.
So I think understanding these reactions and the influence it has on our lives and our psychology is really important.
So let's of course as we always do start with the basics.
Envy is obviously an emotion that occurs when one person wants something that another person has, whether that thing is a material possession or perceived success or stature.
Envy to me is one of those emotions that is never quite felt in isolation or on its own.
It's almost always associated or consists of other elements like longing, like feelings of inferiority, ill will towards the envied person, resentment, guilt.
When a person such as ourselves becomes envious, it is often due to some degree of dissatisfaction with the self.
In other words, envy occurs when a person believes that having what another person has would increase their own happiness.
So this person, this envied person, is almost like a scapegoat for them, right?
It's almost like instead of complaining or instead of looking to myself and feeling like I'm inferior for not having that, I'm going to tear this other person down and find ways in which they are undeserving in order to protect my own ego.
So that's a more psychological definition.
Envy is also commonly known as one of the seven deadly sins.
And I want to highlight an important distinction here between envy and jealousy because I think they are often compared, but also confused.
They sometimes often feel the same.
They look the same.
We use them interchangeably, but whilst jealousy is defensive, it's kind of like an instinct to protect the something that you already have, like feeling jealous of other people looking at your partner or jealous of other people in the workplace because you're worried they're going to be promoted above
you. Envy is offensive.
It's resentment over what someone else has that you like, like the promotion, like the perfect relationship, like they are with someone that you want to be with you.
Envy what they have, jealousy is protecting what you have.
So I think this emotion is really deeply ingrained in our human psyche.
It exists in all of us, in all societies and has so for generations and will continue to do so.
And I think the universality of that kind of goes to show that it may have some purpose, even if we typically think of it as a very distasteful emotion, because something as reactive as envy as maybe aggressive as envy probably would have been eliminated from the kind of gene pool if it didn't serve
some benefit. And we see that in how Envy develops and evolves in us as individuals.
Envy first really appears in really early stages of our development, especially when we are quite young children.
If you've ever been around young kids, something you hear a lot is that everything is so unfair and that life is not fair.
And it's not fair that their friend or their sibling got the toy that they wanted or got the extra dessert or got more Christmas presents.
Often this is really focused on material possessions and you know, kids by nature, I would say are very greedy.
And I think that highlights how perhaps envy is really derived from greed.
But as we get older, we learn to hide that instinct because it's unattractive.
We learn that to be greedy is quite an ugly thing.
But with children, they are yet to develop that social inhibition.
So they really kind of reveal parts of our human nature that adults are better at hiding that adults might not want to admit.
So when we look at envy from an evolutionary perspective, I think that becomes a lot more clear.
You guys know I love my history, deep dives.
I love to explore how current emotions have their origins and some prehistoric instincts.
And I think envy is a really, really good example of this.
I saw someone explain this really well in an article, essentially, in the past, when we were developing as a species, a lot of the resources that we needed to not just survive, but thrive, things like food, materials to build homes, fertile land, places that were secure, even the more developed where we
got wealth and money, those resources were really limited.
And so that created a natural competition, not just between individuals, but groups of people.
And that competition is what created envy and also what created greed.
It benefited us to be more aware of what others had and what we may have lacked in order to motivate us to get those things, in order to motivate us to kind of collect and hoard more of those vital resources.
That has also been influenced by culture.
If you were brought up in a family or an environment that placed a really huge emphasis on success and therefore subsequently competing with others, you are more prone to feeling envious just as a basis of your upbringing.
You're more prone to feeling like you're falling behind, maybe feeling insecure about your achievements and therefore projecting that emotion onto others.
That is reflected in what psychologists have proposed are the conditions of envy.
There are three of these.
Firstly, the person we envy is normally someone who we feel related to in some way.
For example, they are a friend, they are a family member, they are an acquaintance, or in the case of people that we see online or on social media, they have to be individuals who we feel somewhat similar to in terms of things like age, gender, ethnicity, certain personal characteristics.
For example, we are much more likely to envy the wealth and privilege of someone like Bella Hadid or Taylor Swift if you are a woman in your 20s compared to a billionaire like Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch because we feel like we already share some of the same qualities as people like Bella or Taylor.
Yes, we may not be mega famous, we may not be millionaires, but we do feel similar to them in terms of our certain personal characteristics.
And so they become a good point of comparison for what we are maybe lacking or missing out on.
So that really links to this point.
Envy is essentially derived from social comparison.
It develops when we instinctively compare ourselves to others.
Often, once again, those people who are most like us, but also those who we find ourselves to be inferior to.
And although this process is a natural one, I think it's also been deeply exacerbated by recent technological advancements like social media.
We now constantly see the achievements and positive life experiences of everyone we know and everyone we don't know on platforms like Instagram or even LinkedIn for my professional listeners.
And when we are bombarded with this, when we are constantly seeing, I hate the term highlight reel, but that's really what it is, a highlight reel.
We start to feel envious because we know our life as a series of not just achievements, but also imperfections, but we don't see other people's lives like that because they don't give us the option to view them in that way.
They're not going to post on their LinkedIn or on their Instagram like, I had a really tough conversation with my boss today, might be getting fired or like me and my boyfriend broke up.
I feel like no one will ever love me.
Like they're not posting that they're posting the things that are going to make them look good.
But yet we wonder why we are not like that perfect version, why we are not as experienced or as successful or we don't look like them, but we're not as happy as them because that is constantly presented to us front and center everywhere we look.
The second condition of envy is that we can really only envy what we desire.
I know that sounds fairly obvious, but obviously we cannot envy someone's bad luck.
We cannot envy someone's shortcomings or misgivings.
That's because envy is once again at the end of the day about what we lack.
We are the ones with the perceived bad luck or the shortcomings or the deficits.
So we don't envy this other person simply because of what they have.
We envy them because we don't have it and we adopt the attitude that this one quality or one possession or one privilege is what is going to make our lives better.
That is really important to remember.
The pain of envy is caused not just by the desire for the advantages of others per se, but our feelings of inferiority and frustration that is mirrored back to us by someone else's success and it's that insecurity that makes envy such an emotionally painful experience at times.
I think about this a lot in the sense of the people that we can't help but dislike on social media, even if we've never met them.
Social media influences, creators, whatever.
These are the people that we might quote unquote hate to follow and that's the term I actually learned the other day.
It's this case where we know that their content is going to make us feel bad about ourselves.
It's going to elicit envy, but we can't help but keep watching and observing.
They appear to live perfect lives.
They have everything we wanted, maybe the dream job, the curated outfits, the overseas trips, the friendship circle.
Instead of admiring them for it, it makes us so insecure that we can't help but be reactive and judge them.
And it's interesting because envy of this sort really disguises itself because we know that it's not socially acceptable to outright say, I actually really don't like this person and I have no good reason for it other than that I resent their success.
You know, we cannot say that because people are going to look at us funny and be like, what is their deal?
So instead it gives rise to a lot more subtle defensive reactions like character defamation, sarcasm, snobbery, nitpicking, trying to find some flaw or reason that we or others perhaps shouldn't admire this person.
We see that with online personas once again all the time where we implicitly kind of impose some sort of moral high horse like, you know, yeah, sure.
Sure. That person has a million dollars and people think they're great, but at least I wasn't handed everything in life or yeah, sure, they have a private jet, but that is so bad for the environment and at least I'm sustainable.
Anything to simultaneously justify our envy, our dislike whilst also protecting our character.
So concluding that someone isn't deserving is one of the ways that we do that.
I see that all the time and you know what, sometimes that might be fair.
That might be fair.
This person might be like an epo baby or whatnot, but it doesn't eliminate the fact that at the end of the day you are still the one who is reacting from a place of insecurity.
You secretly still want what they have, even if at the same time you're telling yourself that it's a problem.
I think envy is intriguing in that way because when we see something that we desire that we believe we should be entitled to, we often don't consider the full picture.
We don't consider the effort that may have gone into creating that dream life or the sacrifices or maybe even the downsides.
It's so one dimensional to us.
Often our envy convinces us that everything someone else has, everything that we want, that they have, has come to them purely by chance and that it was luck.
And maybe in some ways that is true when we think about, at least like nepotism was one I said before or generational wealth, but in many ways it's a lot more complex than that.
But by blinding us to that, by blinding us to the fact that this person actually maybe did give a whole lot more than we can see for that life, it allows our envy to become self -sustaining and it feels justified.
And when that envy is justified, it's chronic and it leads to a pretty unhappy life, to constantly feel less, to feel like others have more, to feel dissatisfied and in a state of comparison or competition is a really dark place to be in.
And it has a lot of secondary consequences for our relationships, not just with others, but our relationship with ourself and with our own sense of self -worth.
So I think it's incredibly important to explore how we can kind of befriend that green eyed monster.
We have to make friends with it and we have to stop comparing ourselves to others.
I know that is easier said than done, but I'm going to give you some tips for doing just that and we're going to talk about it a lot more after this short break.
Envy -ing others is not going to give you what they have.
It will not help you get any closer to your goals or your dreams, unfortunately.
It's not going to make you happier.
Your envy is also not going to hurt that person whose success you really long for and it's certainly not going to make you many friends.
I think envy and with that competition is such an insidious feeling because we may feel like we're doing something about our fears and insecurities by reflecting them onto the other person, but it also normally manifests in behaviors that self -sabotage, that sabotage not just our own efforts, but also the relationships
we have with where we begin to express resentment, we tear them down, sometimes without even realizing it.
That's the important thing.
I don't think anyone wants to be an envious person.
It's just that it has a strange influence on how we see ourselves and therefore how we treat others.
I think that's the part of it.
It often is so out of our control, probably because it does originate in a lot of self -doubt and limiting beliefs, which are not always operating at the front of our mind because of the fact that they are too painful to acknowledge.
Feeling inadequate is not something that our brain wants to constantly remind us of.
Instead, it will compare and use that as kind of a proxy.
It's a knee jerk reaction to not feeling that we are good enough.
So how are we, you and I, going to stop feeling envious?
And better yet, how are we actually going to project gratitude and joy for what we have regardless of whether someone else happens to have more?
Envy is kind of a question of attitude and it's an attitude, a mindset that is a natural opposite to gratitude and generosity.
When we come across someone who is better or more successful than we are and we experience that typical pain, we get to choose whether we are going to react from a place of comparison and inferiority or respond with genuine happiness for the other person and kind of a mutual gratitude for what we have,
relying on our empathy in those moments.
Sometimes when I feel like I need to compare, instead I try and ask myself the following questions.
If this was me, how would I like to be celebrated for my successes?
How can I make this person feel really amazing about themselves?
And then I also try and be like, what has led this person to this moment?
What has given them their success?
I had this realization the other day and maybe it's not mind blowing for you, maybe I'm late to the party, but I realized that I really do get to choose how I feel.
I am in charge of my own emotions and how they impact my behavior.
And for a long time I was like, envy is this uncontrollable little devil that I have no, no saying.
It just comes about every now and again and I just have to live with it.
I think in those moments when I was experiencing envy and making myself feel bad, I decided that I can reverse that feeling by talking to my envy, talking to myself almost as a third party, almost having like a solo pep talk or advice session where I speak to my to my ego.
The part of me that feels hurt almost like a child and it feels embarrassing to say it out loud, but I started doing this thing where I was basically like, Gemma, is this really benefiting you right now?
Is this making you feel better?
No. So why are you allowing yourself to have this thought?
You can replace that with a better thought.
You can replace it by choosing to focus on what you do have.
And I think this is basically a form of mindfulness whereby we pay attention, full attention to what is going on within us and also outside of you without judgment.
You pay attention to what is triggering you, what is creating this feeling whilst also not needing to be invested in it.
You know, you can feel envy without needing to respond and instead pause, make a mental list of all the ways that you are fulfilled, that you are secure, that you have a lot more than other people do.
Remember this, please, please remember this if you remember only one thing from this episode.
You are not an envious or bad person just because you experience envy.
No emotion is inherently bad or evil.
They all have a place.
And I think envy's purpose in this sense is to serve as a reminder of what you actually aspire for because you wouldn't be jealous of this person if you didn't implicitly desire what they had created for themselves.
So let it serve as a reminder of your goals and your vision for your life.
You know, one of your friends has just bought their first home, has their dream relationship, is getting their PhD, is just like killing it.
You want that. That's why you're envious.
So make it happen. Also, there is always going to be someone who is better than you, quote unquote, better than you, who is doing more, who has more than you, who possesses something that you don't have, but you deeply want.
And that is not a reflection of your character.
Not everything that other people do says something about yourself or your inherent worth as a person.
For every person that you admire and you may feel envious of, they also have someone that they think about in that sense as well.
And I also promise you that there is someone somewhere out there who feels that way about you.
We often don't think about that.
We don't think that we are worthy of the admiration and maybe even the jealousy that we have, you know, at times have for others.
You know, the same ways that we direct those feelings to someone else, we feel envious of them, is the same way that people do that for us.
It's like this weird circular hierarchy where there is a constant wheel of things that people want that you might not have whilst you're looking at someone else and they're wanting what you have.
And no one is ever fully satisfied in that equation.
So when we insist on engaging in what is known as upward social comparison in these moments of only ever thinking about who is doing better than us, we never truly feel grateful for what we have.
Additionally, by reacting with envy in those situations, we prevent ourselves from learning from those who know or understand more than we do.
So we keep ourselves in a place of self -pity, of maybe resentment and definitely stagnation because our pride would rather compare than learn.
I'm going to say that one time, our pride would rather compare than learn.
But when you react with joy and respect for this person, when you begin to see them as someone that you can learn from, you allow yourself to be inspired and you allow yourself to be taught and you actually gain more for yourself than you would have if you just sat there and had a bit of a pity party.
Or if you sat there and let yourself be controlled by an emotion that actually isn't allowing you to progress further.
Additionally, when you feel a spike of envy, this psychologist from the UCLA Department of Psychology, she had some really good advice for this.
She said, question the hell out of it.
Before taking the source of your envy at face value, recognize that a lot of what we see online, even in real life, is not the full truth.
People want to impress other people.
And that means that sometimes they conceal, they tell white lies.
They try and make it seem like they're doing better than they are.
You know, maybe you are really envious of the fact that a lot of the people you went to high school with or uni with have these great careers while you're still chugging your way at university.
But what if the real story was, you know, these people actually haven't taken a day off for like six months, like these people are working like 70, 80 hour weeks, and they're looking at you being like, gosh, I'm so envious that she's still at university that he's still studying.
Other people's lives are never exactly the way that they're presented.
Because once again, we all want to display that really carefully curated version of who we are.
You know, a lot of us are really, really messy.
I think that's important to remember.
And I think about this all the time in terms of my last relationship when my friends would kind of be like, Oh, like we want what you have and like, you guys are perfect for each other.
And that was so far from the truth.
That was so far from the truth.
But I didn't want to tell them that I didn't want anyone to see the whole picture.
So I think the reminder here is that envious about wanting something that someone else has, but also probably not really understanding what that fully means, or not really having the full picture.
Finally, like I said before, you do get to choose how you feel.
And if envy is part of who you are at the moment, if it's interrupting the pursuit of your goals, or making you doubt your progress, maybe it's making you copy what someone else is doing, trying to be more like them.
My biggest advice, and I've said it before, I'm going to say it again.
You can remove that trigger.
You can unfollow the people who make you doubt yourself and your journey and our source of envy.
Go to your Instagram right now or your Tiktok or your Twitter, whatever it is, and purge.
It is not worth it.
Trust me. At the very least, you can meet these people.
And this will have the dual benefit of lessening your experience of envy so that you can manage it in a productive way.
And also reducing how often you question your own path and your authenticity.
You know, sometimes we always want to, we think that the perfect, like someone else has figured out the perfect equation for our dream life.
But the thing is that as our dream life, they're living their dream life.
It's going to be different.
I know social comparison can be so impossibly hard, especially in this decade, where everyone is further along or at a different stage.
There's so much room to feel like you are not good enough, or you need to feel envious of other successes.
But as your final reminder for the day, I want you to remember that your path is completely unique.
And you never know when it's going to be your time.
You never know when things will suddenly transform for you or switch.
And the more time you spend devoting all that energy that you could spend feeling envious, and instead choose to invest it in your goals, the greater the outcomes are going to be.
Like, genuinely like do a physical head pivot and be like, I can spend my time looking right and left at what everyone else is doing.
But I'm not spending a lot of time looking forward if I'm doing that.
And spending way more time seeing what other people what what they think is right, and seeing what other people think is good and cool and what their successes are, that is the easiest way to get distracted from your own goals.
So I really hope that you have enjoyed this episode.
There is no shame around MV.
I want to say that again.
We all experience this.
I experienced this.
It is so biological and evolutionary.
It is so deeply imprinted in our DNA to want what others have.
But hopefully this provided you with some kind of insights into why that is, and some tips, hopefully some knowledge on where to go from here and how to really just be grateful and happy for what you have and the journey that you are on without needing to look at other people to validate that for you.
As always, if you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening right now.
Thank you for putting up with my voice.
I know it is still quite nasally.
I'm still a little bit sick.
So please bear with me.
It's slowly getting better.
And if you have an episode suggestion, if you just want to see behind the scenes what we're doing, what we're up to, please feel free to follow me at that psychology podcast or you can follow my personal Instagram at that Gemma Spag.
We would love to have you back.
Make sure you're following and we will see you next week for another episode on Tuesday.
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