Healthy Envy: What Is It And Why Is It Not So “healthy”?
We often talk about two types of envy: pure envybased on hostility towards others, and healthy envyof which on many occasions we only know that, for some reason, it is not as harmful as the other.
But… What really is healthy envy and to what extent can it harm us?
Appealing to the most agreed upon definition, envy can be understood as a form of greed, a feeling produced by our desire to possess something that someone other than ourselves has and that we believe should be ours The fact that we see how someone has something desirable that has been denied to us causes unpleasant and painful feelings to appear.
Part of this feeling of discomfort that envy produces is based on what is known as cognitive dissonance: we experience how there is an incongruence between our mental schema of how things are and how things really are, beyond our ideas and beliefs.
In this case, We believe that something belongs to us and, however, reality shows us that this is not the case In this way, envy places us in a very uncomfortable situation: that of accepting that the ideas about ourselves (and, therefore, those that have to do with our self-esteem) are too optimistic, or that of believing that we have been victims of injustice, something that must be resolved through our efforts in order to get closer to what we believe we have the legitimacy to claim.
Thus, the generic concept of “envy”, which does not include the nuances of the idea of healthy envy, is linked to unpleasant sensations. But… Could a phenomenon similar to this exist that does not produce a minimal amount of pain? Is healthy envy something entirely different from plain envy, or is it simply the milder and relatively painless version of this phenomenon?
In 2015, a team of researchers published very specific research on this topic that reinforces the first option. In this study it was found that there are significant differences that allow us to distinguish between two types of envy: one malignant and the other benign.
In the first, the person who experiences this sensation focuses their thoughts on the person who has had access to what they covet and that has not been achieved for themselves. Furthermore, people who present this type of envy in a certain context show a greater tendency to feel happy imagining that something bad happens to the person they are envious of. People who experience healthy or benign envy, however, focus their thoughts not on the person who owns something they want, but on what they own and want for themselves.
So, while evil envy revolves around thoughts about “how lucky” another person has been and the disadvantaged position one has placed oneself in, Healthy envy apparently predisposes us to adopt a more pragmatic and constructive point of view
The bad thing about healthy envy
So… can we simply conclude that healthy envy is the best possible way to experience envy? It is a hasty conclusion. Although healthy envy may be experienced less unpleasantly than the other, it is worth asking the following question: Which of these two types of envy makes us more capable of detecting injustices where they exist? In the absence of more research to help answer this question, “malignant” envy is likely to be what predisposes us to it.
Healthy envy, by simply focusing on what we want, may be related to an inability to analyze the context in which the other person has had access to a resource of limited availability that has been deprived of us. In some way, it transfers the responsibility for what has happened to oneself, since sometimes the fact that we cannot have something available does not have to be due to a problem that we have individually (lack of attitude, laziness, etc.). ) but may be due to social problems, which cannot be reduced to what each individual does on their own.
For example, feeling envious of a person who masters a good level of English may be a consequence of the fact that, simply, in our neighborhood the schools that we had the option to attend have a serious lack of resources and financing that did not allow us to learn English in good conditions.
As usual, The key to finding meaning in certain psychological phenomena is knowing how to contextualize this type of research. contrasting them with studies carried out from the social sciences.
