An Exploration into Envy, Jealousy and Comparison
Embracing these emotions and how to perform comparison
This post is an exploration of jealousy, envy, and comparison and how they are subtly different from each other. I also throw some light on the role of randomness in life mainly because many of us aren’t aware of it. I believe that if you can wrap your head around the unpredictable nature of life, you can quickly get away with the envy episodes. I also talk about three approaches to doing comparison instead of avoiding it.
Envy vs jealousy
First of all, it’s totally okay to feel envious/jealous occasionally. Your best friend got into Google. Half a part of you is happy for them while one-fourth is envious and one-fourth of you is angry with yourself. Probably angry about why you couldn’t put a similar grind. Sometimes your mom telling you “Falana Uncle ka dhimkana beta got into IIT or Goldman Sachs” (translation for English people: x uncle’s son got into IIT or Goldman Sachs) might invoke such envy episodes.
We often mix up envy and jealousy but they are subtly different. Envy is more about feeling discontent and desire for something you do not have; you might crave someone else’s success. The previous paragraph is all about envy.
Jealousy is more like a silent storm, stirred by fears of loss and tinged with insecurity. It’s about craving more attention. You may feel that sting of jealousy when your colleague gets a promotion for a position you were hoping for. Sibling rivalries are pretty common scenarios. It could also be towards someone who your girlfriend might be attracted to although I hope not; it’s just a common trope in romance movies and anime.
It’s okay to feel them
Both envy and jealousy are natural emotions.
Evolutionary Psychology: Envy can be traced to act as motivation for a person to increase their status and resources. Jealousy is to prevent things like infidelity and ensure better care of child. When a partner senses a threat to their relationship, jealousy may induce and they make extra efforts to reach their partner’s needs, attempt to make themselves more competent and attractive.
Since both these emotions are deeply rooted in us, I think we shouldn’t feel bad about them. However, staying in such a state for a long period of time can significantly degrade one’s mental health and baseline quality of life.
I have been in such a state a couple of years ago and it sucks. It was during the placements time (basically a job search towards the end of college) and I was not able to meet my expectations. I could see friends getting into better companies who I thought were less hardworking or skilled than me. More than envy, I was angry with myself. It’s easy to compare yourself even more out of feeling low. But eventually, I got lucky, moved on, and slowly healed. I feel and function much better from a peaceful state of mind.
Basic healing methods
Adjust environment
If you find yourself in envious states frequently, try adjusting your digital environment (social media feeds) and real-life environment (spending less time with people who cause such feelings or talking with them). I have heard many people quit Instagram.
Mindfulness and reflection
Nowadays, I notice such feelings and mostly move on swiftly to other things. This is the mindfulness approach. It becomes easy after some practice. I occasionally take note of what might have sparked envy and carry on with my stuff. Later I reflect: What was I thinking I was missing, and do I really need to improve in it or get it? Do I genuinely want it? Is that a game I want to play? Most of the time, I realize it was not useful and didn't align with my desires. Yet there are moments when this process helps me find my shortcomings and potential areas to improve. Now, I can hold the other person as an inspiration.
Meditation can help enhance focus and (mindfulness) meditation can help you improve mindfulness (noticing thoughts, and letting them go). Interestingly, some people have a higher tendency for jealousy/envy, especially smarter people. I think meditation will prove even more useful for them. Although I have heard that ambitious people avoid meditation as they think it could quell their drive.
On comparison
Compare to who you were yesterday - Approach 1
Comparison can spur jealousy or envy, but it can also be done impartially. We typically compare ourselves to similar others. People who we think are close to us in terms of career, competency, wealth, and appearance. You might have heard the term “hyperlocality” from Cred Founder Kunal Shah. So naturally, the first thought to solve jealousy is to avoid comparison with others.
“Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” I love this quote from Dr. Peterson. Here’s a 5-minute video that I recommend watching. Political stuff aside which I don’t understand anyways, he has very good thoughts on psychology and adjacent topics. He’s been a major motivator for me to get better at thinking by writing.
Paraphrasing Peterson, the idea is to avoid comparison with others because firstly you don’t often know what you are jealous of and secondly you do not know the person in their entirety. The simple logic for the latter is the major divergence that takes place in our lives as we age in various dimensions like family, education, wealth, and opportunities. You tend to see their high points while their lives may be full of miseries and malevolence. You don’t know them even if you think you know them well.
But since you want to improve, you can take yourself as a reference point. Figure out the things that are wrong with you and try to improve on those axes. If you consistently make improvements, then your growth will only compound. “You should be better than you are but it's not because you're worse than other people; it's because you're not everything you should be.”
Are you willing to trade lives with them, most likely not if you know about them fully? Naval said something similar once upon a time. You can refer to Naval’s point of view on envy .
Some of my friends tell that this doesn’t work for them. I mean, you will still feel those emotions but if you understand these ideas at a deep level, you can cycle through such episodes much faster. I think both Peterson and Naval’s thoughts are deeply rooted in “randomness”. Take a shot (of water because it’s summer) every time I use the word random in the next section.
Randomness
It may surprise many, but life is unpredictably random, to the point of seeming absurd or even nihilistic. Your life starts with the roll of a dice. You are born in a random family in a random city in a random country. “Where you live” for a long amount of time is decided randomly. Privilege is random. We don’t really have a choice till we become independent. You will probably come across your partner through a serendipitous process. I think many are not aware because they offload all the uncertainty and randomness to God if they believe in One.
Amidst its mystery and beauty, randomness dominates life. Life becomes a process of figuring out what things fit to you and the things you fit to. Figuring out what you truly want and pruning through the randomness of life. When I find something that resonates with me, I call it a serendipitous match. (some future post maybe)
We often envy others’ success. For getting into a coveted company or founding a successful startup or clearing some competitive examination. That’s where people most often do not take randomness into account. There is lot of randomness in the process in terms of the economic decision in the company, cognitive biases in interviews, your skill-fit with the company etc. I think a startup’s product market fit is also a good representation of a macro-serendipitous match.
The famous Bhagavad Gita quote is all about embracing randomness by surrendering control over it. You can instead think of God while performing your deeds and forget thinking of the actions and things outside your control.
We often predict correlation between phenomena but more often than not, they are not connected. There are maybe a bunch of variables in the equation that you are simply not taking into account. “Things are not as connected as you think they are. They aren’t as disconnected either. If you make these connections, you have been fooled by randomness.” Once you internalize this, it will simplify your thinking by leaps and bounds. You will find that usually, there aren’t more than 2-3 major factors and rest have tiny role to play.
I highly recommend you spend time understanding survivorship bias. It’s interesting plus it will significantly simplify your thinking. We often focus on an outlier group of people who got successful and discount a large number of people who didn’t make it yet. There’s a lot of luck (randomness) involved for successful people and you might not achieve the same outcome regardless of your hard work, or talent. My favorite videos on the topic are this and below. May god give us all the serendipity we need.
Randomness x Butterfly effect
You might feel similar to others, but countless unique quirks set us apart, born from our distinct, random environments. I touched upon this major visibility of randomness during transitions, like graduation, in a previous post titled "College Friends."
Pulling the string from both ends - Approach 2
Approach 1 is a scalable approach and I have seen it work for friends. To avoid envy and jealousy, you can just skip comparison. The contradiction that arises here is how will you come to know about your shortcomings. How will fuel your motivation? These are common questions. This is one end of the idea. I and a good friend had these questions 3 years back and we came up with this approach building up on Peterson’s advice.
The other end of the idea is to compare with others. Comparison is necessary. I propose that you observe others, preferably relevant people who are in the same game. Strictly observe. Investigate what they have been doing. What led to their success? Notice any feelings that arise and just keep investigating. I frame it as “Compare but don’t beat yourself up. Compare but do not get overconfident”. A short episode of envy is very likely.
Reading this might cause some cognitive dissonance. It’s normal to feel so. You need to avoid comparison but sometimes you need to compare. You need to pull the string from both ends.
Look both front and behind - Approach 3
I think this is the most pragmatic approach. Compare with people who are ahead of you but do not forget to compare those who are behind you. Look both front and behind and you will be fine. He mentions (false) confidence because most of our confidence is delusional. It’s delusional because our confidence in predicting reality which is random!
I guess that’s it for this post. If you read till here, thank you so much! The next section are a couple of songs I liked in the last few days
Music I liked in the past week
Night Dancer. Like the hip-hop and casual vibe in this.
Shinunoga E-wa is about a person who can’t get over his girl. He can’t live without her so he did rather die. It’s a beautiful song with a wide range of vocals.
Well, I still envy your writing and clarity of mind, senpai
Thanks for writing this. I'm currently in the situation were I know that it's all random success failure, I know it can be engineered in my favour. But I'm confused how and what should I do to make it in my favour.
The thing about all the psychological things you mentioned above is that while reading I was like hmm I know this, ok I knew this as well. But I know all the problems not their answers. All the psychologist say about envy, jealousy, and all the generic stuff and not the applicable things to do to avoid it.
Anyway nice post.