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

Illustration: Aaron Fernandez

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 which there is only one word [for envy], the negative connotation dominates, and the idea is that envy is always bad,” says Marcel Zeelenberg, a professor of economic psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

Malicious envy, the kind English-speakers are likely to mean when referring to “envy” in any context, consumes us, and often leads us to harm someone else or revel in their failure. “Malicious envy implies that one is compelled to act out, or take destructive action based on emotional impulses, like actively sabotaging the object of your envy,” says Hilary Jacobs Hendel, psychotherapist and author of It’s Not Always Depression. “[It can] eat you up inside with obsessive thoughts and ruminations.”

“Where malicious envy drives us to tear someone down, benign envy inspires us to push ourselves to match them,” says Zeelenberg, who has studied the difference between the two. He says envy can be a tool for self-improvement…