Envy and Bare Knuckle Fighting

How to convert envy to gratitude with a core Stoic principle

Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash

Aristotle said that “Envy is pain at the good fortune of others.”

We must have it for a reason, and to find its utility we can go back to hunter-gatherer days. Envy’s pain was felt when someone else had something that we too wanted but didn’t have.

The typical evolutionary explanation is that there are two sides of envy:

On the positive side, it gave us the motivation to excel - to get the thing we felt like fools for not having.

On the negative side, if uncontrolled, it fueled our efforts to withdraw, or evade, or tear others down to share a portion of our misery with us because misery loves company.

In the ancestral world, these two options made sense. Envy was capped. There were only so many things we could want (spears, mates, shelter, food), and those things aided in survival. All we had to do was walk the positive path which meant life as opposed to the negative one which meant death.  

So we possess envy.

For my part, I am most envious of those who are able to flow through life with ease. Not those who live easy lives – of what use is a corpse when the hammer falls? – but those who excel in their profession and their relationships and their physical abilities and their dangerous and exotic hobbies and do so with an easy smile as if things just sort of worked out that way.  

I compare this mode of life to my nightly self-crucifixion and I feel the nag of envy in the primitive corners of my brain.

According to evolutionary theory, these are my two choices:

I can choose a “positive” interpretation of my envy and try to get what he has for myself, which more often than not is impossible, and in this case is absolutely impossible.

Or I can walk the “negative” path and wallow in woe at my misfortune, withdrawing from any and all effort since I’ll never be anything but a knuckle-dragger. And if while knuckling down the negative path I don’t choose to withdraw, but like some unlovable wretch I instead choose to lean into hatred for these easy-achievers, what then does my life’s philosophy become? Nihilism. What does it say about the things I want in life? That they are dependent upon what is not under my control. And what is the error of my thinking? That I am addicted to what I think reality should be but in fact is not.

I become sarcastic, a false-brother, and I curse the Universe and God and Nature for everything that goes wrong in my life from dropping a glass in the kitchen to getting into a car crash, and all the while the clock keeps ticking as my precious time on this earth dwindles.   

I can stick with theory’s two options and want It, whatever It is, even though It is outside of my control. If I do, I am nothing more than a madman clawing at air; I am asking to fail and begging to be a slave to a mere delusion.  

But nature has gifted us a third option that requires submission to neither the positive nor the negative expressions of envy. This is the portion that makes us fully human; the portion that loves a bare-knuckle fight when the ships are burned and we have nothing left on earth but to learn what we really are inside; this is the portion that contemplates a thing to learn what it truly is.

Photo by Sebastian Hages on Unsplash

I can take this thought that permeates my skull – this thought born of envy – and wrap my hands around it.

I can look at it and say, “Come here thought. Do not skulk on the boundaries of my consciousness – come out into the light where I can see you and learn what you are, so that I can decide for myself if you’re acceptable, or if you ought to be crushed and rewritten in a more ancient and useful script.”

And when I do this, what follows?

I will guide my primitive mind to a new understanding. I will meet with envy, sit with her, and compare her to the pumping of blood in my veins and the flow of my breath and the sight of the woods and the stars.

I will sit and seriously think for a moment that tomorrow I will die.

Do I then choose to spend this day in envy, or in gratitude?

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