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There Are Two Types of Envy, and Only One Is Toxic
Malicious envy is almost always self-destructive, but benign envy can be a tool for self-improvement
It’s hard to find someone who has anything good to say about envy. It’s not just that it’s an unpleasant feeling to experience — it’s also widely considered a litmus test of character, a window into the darker inclinations of the person who holds it. 18th-century writer William Hazlitt once called it a “littleness of the soul.” Nearly 2,000 years earlier, Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder quipped that it “always implies unconscious inferiority wherever it resides.” It’s a deadly sin, a red flag for insecurity, a driver of greed.
It’s also natural, and ubiquitous. In one 2015 study, around three-quarters of participants surveyed admitted to envying someone in the past year, whether that person was a close friend or a more distant acquaintance.
Envy is a deeply nuanced emotion, with shades of gray often erased by the limitations of the English language. Other tongues around the world — Dutch, Polish, Thai, and German, for example — have different words to differentiate between two different types of envy: malicious and benign.
It turns out, the way we speak about envy changes our perspective on it. “In languages in…
