ENVYING YOUR FRIENDS---"FRENVY"

You would rarely find a 26 year old lady envying the 25 year old multi-talented Rihanna even though her dream was to be as talented and famous at that age. Rihanna would rather be her role model. However, the same 25 year old would envy Clara, her 22 year old girlfriend who just got married. Rather than be genuinely happy for Clara, you’d fine her desperately looking for reasons why Clara doesn’t deserve to be married and why the marriage would never last longer than a Kim Kardashian marriage. Now, although this certainly does not happen in all cases, I’m trying to bring home a point, and that is,
by way of human nature, jealousy is more intense when someone close to us does well in a domain in which ourselves want to do well in.  It could be anything, anything at all. You love to catwalk but you can’t, Tracy your friend gets all the attention because she loves to catwalk and she can, Beyonce loves to catwalk and she can with 100 times more attention, but you envy Tracy rather than Beyonce. Why? Because Tracy is close to you and Beyonce isn’t. Sometimes, it might not even be something that you are interested in. That the person is moving forward generally and you didn’t expect him/her to, can make you jealous especially if you haven’t relatively moved forward yourself.

          There may be times when you genuinely don’t want to be jealous, you really don’t. But then you can’t help that disgusting feeling in your gut when you see or hear of the person’s progress. Indeed, envy is an ugly emotion, rearing its ugly green head where it isn’t wanted.

So granted, its human to feel jealous when things go better for your close pals, but remaining jealous and twisting it maliciously is at your own risk and trust me, it never pays off.  Interestingly, your envy doesn’t change much in the world. Those whom you envy will always be beautiful, talented, photogenic, rich, successful, intelligent and good dressers. They will always get married and have children, they will still get that appointment, they will still get whatever else it is you are jealous about. So do yourself a favour and channel that energy into something productive.

According to psychologists, envy could be malicious or benign. While the malicious envy is bitter, driven by the need to tear a person down, benign envy is more aspirational- “if he can do it, so can I”. Though the feeling is still unpleasant, it is still coated with admiration rather than resentment.  According to Christie of Oprah magazine, “because this person similar to you has this thing you covet, you can imagine having it too. Your sober judgement was that it was unobtainable but now that she has it, you can almost taste it. At this juncture, you can either let your envy inspire you to pursue the goal you want or let it poison your relationship”.

Don’t let it poison your relationship. What you should do is this, acknowledge that you are jealous. There’s no point trying to deny it. You may hide the fact from yourself but others can easily see from your actions and facial expressions that you are jealous. So, if you must get past this feeling, you have to acknowledge it. If it helps, even say it to him or her in a friendly way (it makes you seem less negative).   After acknowledging it, wish the best for those you are jealous of (really tryyyy to be happy for them); discover what you want in life, get your ass up and work towards that-let it be your call to action, your wake up call; Don’t let it be a competition, have fun doing what you do, commit to it, and watch your platform elevate tremendously. Finally, always remember that there are people out there that also hold you in high regard, people you may be unaware of. So don’t let them down, be the best you can be at all times.