Envy Is Not the Enemy

I'll tell you what you want, what you really really want

(Today’s the fourth Friday of our Fridays-in-April program, April Flowers. First Friday was about stupid, Second Friday was about bored, and Third Friday was about different)

Envy!

Oh it’s bad.

Envy is one of the Seven Deadly Sins!

Envy is “INVIDIA,” second from the left in the top row, the one with all the snakes. 17th century image courtesy Look and Learn History Picture Archive.

Envy is one of the villains of Inside Out 2 (and a boring one too I might add):

Not much going on with this one. Image courtesy Pixar.

Oh and envy feels bad. Hot and shameful and weak and self-loathing. Zero stars do not recommend.

But here is something maybe nobody taught you about envy and if that’s the case I am sorry and that happened to me too and what else are we missing out on?? Curse that Catholic education or whatever did it wrong for you.

But here it is:

Tell me what you are envious of, and I will tell you what you want.

For example, here’s a random smattering of folks of whom I’ve been envious in the past several years:

• Dave Eggers

• Agatha Christie

• Samantha Irby

• Adam Grant

• Housecat

• Carolyn Hax

• John Paul Brammer

I experienced this envy as extremely unpleasant and self-abnegating. I saw what those people/creatures had, and I realized that I didn’t have it, and that feeling burned me so badly.

But I didn’t understand that taken together, the people/creatures I envied told me everything I needed to know about what I actually did want:

• Dave Eggers

  • Author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Pulitzer Prize finalist)

  • Proprietor of pirate supply store

  • Founder of 826 Valencia and publisher of books about teaching kids to write

• Agatha Christie

  • “Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Her books have sold more than a billion copies in English and another billion in a hundred foreign languages. She is the author of eighty crime novels and short-story collections, nineteen plays, two memoirs, and six novels written under the name Mary Westmacott.” (jacket copy from William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins)

• Samantha Irby

  • Bestselling author and amazing newsletter writer

  • Funny as hell (“Hello, 911?”)

• Adam Grant

  • Shares wisdom about life’s problems on Glassdoor, in the New York Times, and on every podcast under the sun

• Housecat

  • Zero tasks to complete

  • Zero f*cks to give

• Carolyn Hax

  • World’s most popular syndicated advice columnist

  • Funny as hell

• John Paul Brammer

  • Author of a brilliant newsletter, including an advice column, ¡Hola Papi! and publisher of a book that combines memoir and advice-giving

  • Funny as hell

That’s right, I actually did have all of those secret hidden desires.

Unbeknownst to me (me! the person who supposedly knows me the best!), I wanted to:

• Write a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, bonus points if it’s very popular

• Teach people about reading, writing, and creativity

• Write works worth reading in a hundred languages

• Have the freedom to decide how to spend my day, including sleeping on the sofa if I feel like it

• Not give a f*ck

• Give advice people want to hear and read

• Make people laugh - a lot [I think running a pirate supply store is a subset of this one]

And all of these insights were just sitting there. Because of my shame around my envy, I barely understood even the most blatantly obvious of these connections.

And only now, many years after all these envy cycles began, am I actually doing any concrete work towards achieving them.

For example, only now in the Year of Our Lord 2025 am I actually writing anything that I like enough to let anyone else read it.

And you are reading it, baby! We are on our way!

Let Your Envy Tell You What You Want

I talk to my dear clients and many of them are quite unhappy and when I ask them what they want, they really don’t know.

So I’ve started asking people who and what they envy when they look at the world around them. And then we work backwards to what that means they want.

So your mini-assignment for today is - who or what do you envy right now? And why?

The more hidden and shameful you feel about your envy of this person/thing, the better. That is how we will understand the desires and hopes and dreams that might be most hidden, even from yourself.

And now, the $64M question: what does your envy of that person/thing tell you about what you yourself want right now?

And is there a teeny-tiny baby step you could take to make that desire/hope/dream a reality for yourself?

And could you take that baby weenie-itty-bitty step today?

Please try it and report back.

Don’t go it alone,

Genevieve