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How to Stop Feeling Jealous of Your Friends’ Success
It feels awful, but envy within peer and friend groups is not unusual
Two of my best friends got new jobs this month. Great jobs. Impressive jobs. Jobs with solid salaries and opportunities for career growth. I love these people. I want them to succeed, and I know they want the same for me. I am really, truly thrilled for them.
Or at least I really, truly want to be. But when our group text-thread blew up the other day with their good news, I felt strange.
These messages weren’t a surprise: We had eyeballed application materials together, and workshopped negotiation strategies. What was surprising was the envy that gnawed away at me, even as I added my congratulations in text and emojis.
I made a mental list, detailing all the reasons the logical part of my brain knew this jealousy was ridiculous: These are some of my favorite people. I’m employed. Hell, I love my job most days of the week. We work in different industries; it’s not like these were jobs I’d want or am qualified to do. Other people’s success doesn’t diminish my own.
And then, when that didn’t work, I called a professional. Jessica Methot is a human resource management professor at both Rutgers and Exeter. “Despite not being in the same industry, you still see your friends as a relevant social comparison, and use their successes as a benchmark for your own self-worth,” Methot told me. Our jobs are central to our identity, she explained: “If we identify with our careers, this is even more salient than, say, identifying with tangible signals of success such as a larger apartment.”
A 2015 study on envy found that we’re more prone to the feeling when it comes to people who share our gender, and are approximately our age — like our friends.
This made me feel a little less like the world’s worst friend. And it turns out envy within peer and friend groups is not unusual. A 2015 study found that we’re more prone to the feeling when it comes to people who share our gender, and are approximately our age — like our friends. This career-related envy peaked for subjects in their…
