Envy and jealousy: They’re different

Jan 22, 2010, 12.00am IST
Homayun Taba.


If there ever were a tug of war between jealousy and envy, the latter would surely win.


Though the terms are used interchangeably, there is a difference between the two. Jealousy is milder, and is often more visible. Envy sticks to one’s soul like a leech, draining a lot of psychic energy. Inherently deep-seated and unspoken, envy is not easily detectable either by the one who feels it or to others.


Buddhists talk of five mental poisons: passion or grasping, aggression, delusion or ignorance, arrogance and envy. Envy also finds its place among Christianity’s seven deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust.


A popular commercial was promoting a consumer product by insinuating that acquiring it would create pride in the owner and evoke the envy of others. It showed a devil in the background. It exalted two of the seven deadly sins in one sentence. While jealousy may ease or somehow play itself out in case you acquired the product yourself, envy never does.


Another mark of envy is that peculiar feeling of enjoying the misfortune of others. La Rochefoucauld said that we all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others. The Germans have a word for it, Schadenfreude – delight in another’s failure or defeat, captured humourously, yet appropriately by Gore Vidal’s statement: “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”


Envy is like a perpetual conveyor belt of packages of jealousies. It feeds on a perceived sense of deprivation, filling the person with bitter resentment and remorse, usually about the unfairness of it all; a why-not-me fixation. In this state it becomes easy to overlook one’s own blessings. If we are not aware of this, envy can suck us into a whirlpool of discontent.

Envy leads to a persistent sense of smallness close to what Nietzsche called the “spirit of heaviness.” Its undercurrent implies that at all times one needs to be smarter, richer, more popular or prosperous than another. Can this ever be possible? The ridiculousness of it stares us in the face.


The cure lies very much within each one of us. We need to come to terms with realities that each life is unique and unfolds according to its own course, that none has been spared trouble, that each has his own cross to bear. Hence comparisons are not helpful. One needs to look less to others’ fortune, misfortune or place in life and more at one’s own life path. Why am i here? What do i need to do? Where and how can my talents unfold and be recognised?


Three remedies could perhaps help to reduce the pangs of envy – a sense of gratefulness for all that one has; secondly, the sense of santosh, or contentment; thirdly, living with a ‘This too shall pass’ philosophical attitude. An Italian proverb captures the needed attitude by using a metaphor of chess: “After the game, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.”


We may not subscribe to these lines of the Persian poet Sa’di’s: “Die, O envious man, for this is a malady/ Deliverance from which can be obtained only by death.” But we can learn that the more we fight envy the tighter the knots get, but acceptance paradoxically diffuses its power, and it no longer has the charge of an unknown negative force. Living out of a sense of transience and keeping our dying at all times in front of our mind, suddenly, envy is cornered.
If unchecked, envy tends to diminish all in whom it takes possession and ends up shriveling the heart, clouding judgment, narrowing generosity, and most of all, harming the soul.