when envy is a GPS

...and when it is not

Envy is the only deadly sin that doesn't feel good in the moment. Gluttony has its pleasures. Lust certainly does. Even wrath offers a kind of dark satisfaction. But envy? Envy just hurts.

Psychologist Yochi Cohen-Charash's research reveals something fascinating about envy's peculiar logic: we tend to envy those who feel just adjacent to our own position in life.

So instead of billionaires or celebrities triggering our deepest envy, it's often those who seem to be living slightly better versions of our own story. This explains the peculiar intensity of influencer snark culture – the visceral reaction to watching someone seemingly ordinary transform their bedroom video hobby into a lucrative career, receiving daily packages of free luxury goods and paid vacations. It’s the tantalizingly accessible nature of their success, the nagging whisper of "that could have been me."

The strangest thing about envy is watching it transform through the chapters of your life, like rings in a tree marking different seasons of growth. I remember being in middle school, legs crossed on my bedroom floor, consumed by the particular kind of jealousy that feels possible only when you're thirteen and the world hasn't yet taught you how to hide your wanting. It was the era of Triangl bikinis, when having one meant you were part of an exclusive club of girls who seemed to have life figured out – their bodies somehow already sculpted to perfection, their Instagram feeds a carefully curated display of summer happiness, their romantic lives straight out of a teen movie (it is deeply depressing that girls learn to hate their bodies before they learn geometry… but I digress).

I can still feel that hot, tight knot in my stomach as I scrolled through ask.fm, watching boys rank the "top 10 hottest girls" in our grade with a casualness that belied how deeply it would affect us all. The way my heart would race whenever a new ranking appeared, hoping to see my name while simultaneously dreading the possibility of its absence (I can’t believe we were letting teenage boys moonlight as beauty pageant judges, but I digress again).

The jealousy back then was all-consuming, a constant awareness of where you stood in the invisible hierarchies of adolescence. I wanted to be deemed worthy in a world that seemed to have such specific criteria for what made a girl valuable. I wanted so desperately to be one of "those" girls, the ones who never seemed to question their place in the world, who walked through school hallways with an ease I couldn't fathom.

The envy evolved in high school. College decisions became the new currency of worth. I remember refreshing admission portals with the desperate rhythm of an addict, my stomach dropping with each peer’s celebratory post about their early acceptance. Every "I'm proud to announce..." felt like another reminder of what I hadn't achieved, even though I hadn't yet figured out what I actually wanted to achieve.

Looking back now, I realize my strongest bouts of envy coincided with the times I felt most disconnected – from myself, from genuine friendships, from any clear sense of purpose.

In middle school, when my friend group felt more like a strategic alliance than real connection, every perceived slight or exclusion cut deep. In high school, when I was still trying on different versions of myself like ill-fitting clothes, I envied anyone who seemed to have found their style. I didn't have the self-assuredness I have now. Without that internal compass, everything that glittered looked like gold – other people's dreams became my desires simply because they seemed to want them so badly.

It's like I was trying to navigate using someone else's map, wondering why none of the landmarks looked familiar. Every time I saw someone succeed at something – anything – I thought, "Maybe that's what I should want too." When you don't know yourself, envy is a terrible career counselor, a horrible friend-finder, an awful life coach. It's like using a broken compass that points toward whatever shiny thing last caught your attention.

But something alchemical happens as your self-knowledge deepens. When you finally develop that bone-deep clarity about who you are and what you want, envy transforms from a chaotic compass into a precision instrument. Instead of spinning wildly at every passing dream, it becomes a sophisticated GPS, dropping pins at the exact coordinates of your genuine potential. The static clears, the needle steadies, and suddenly you can read the signal through the noise.

Now, I've surrounded myself with friends who shine so bright they could light up cities - intelligent, hardworking, fiercely loving souls who seem to bend the world toward their dreams through sheer force of will. Their light doesn't cast shadows on my own. When they win, I can feel joy reverberate in me like a bell struck in perfect pitch. These days, what breaks my heart isn't their brilliance but any moment they doubt it - watching them fold themselves smaller, talk themselves out of reaching. Rising tides raise all ships, as the saying goes. But I think first, we must learn to see ourselves as part of the same ocean rather than competing vessels. And maybe before that, we need to understand what kind of ship we're meant to be, what distant shores are calling our name.

Yet envy hasn't disappeared from my life entirely – it's simply gained precision, like a lens finally coming into focus. These days, it manifests most clearly in the digital realm, where careers unfold in carefully curated highlight reels. I feel it most acutely when scrolling through LinkedIn or Twitter: that familiar tightness in my chest when someone announces a book deal, a speaking engagement, a career milestone that feels simultaneously within reach and frustratingly distant.

I've started thinking about this selectivity of envy as a sophisticated internal guidance system. Now that I know myself, it's stopped pointing wildly at every passing dream and instead indicates precise coordinates of possibility. The fact that I never envy my friends' personal milestones anymore but still feel that twist in my gut when someone in my industry achieves something remarkable – isn't this my deeper self whispering about the path I'm meant to pursue?

Last week, I watched a former colleague give a keynote speech at a conference. As I sat in my dimly lit kitchen, wearing day-old sweatpants and nursing a cooling cup of coffee, I felt that familiar serpentine twist coiling around my ribs. But this time, instead of letting the feeling slither away unexamined, I held it up to the light. Like a scientist studying a fascinating specimen under glass, I observed its particular quality, its specific gravity, the way it seemed to pulse with a different rhythm than the envy of my younger years. This didn’t feel like the bitter sting of comparison, no. It was more like recognition, a mirror reflecting back my own unuttered ambitions.

This felt like a crystallization of my own buried ambitions, the ones I'd carefully labeled "impractical" or "someday" and stored away in the dusty corners of possibility.

Gerrod Parrott's distinction between malicious and benign envy becomes deeply personal here. The malicious variety, born from that old self-doubt, would have me dissecting her achievement like a critic at their most cynical - finding flaws in her delivery, comfort in imagined stumbles, solace in hypothetical failures. But benign envy, this new evolutionary stage? It's like a compass that's finally found true north, revealing not just what we want, but what we're capable of becoming when we stop running from our own potential.

This careful parsing of envy – this almost meditative examination of its meaning – leads us to ask: what does it mean that we can simultaneously celebrate others' achievements while yearning for our own version of them?

Perhaps this paradox itself is sacred, teaching us something profound about the dual nature of human consciousness: our capacity to hold both contentment and aspiration in the same breath, like a bird that's found its perch but still feels the urge to fly.

And for my fellow nerds, the neuroscience behind this is almost poetic. Researchers like Hidehiko Takahashi have shown that envy lights up the same neural neighborhoods as physical pain. No wonder we flinch from it, scroll past it, try to numb it with distraction or denial! But pain, when we learn to read its language, becomes diagnostic - a sophisticated feedback system illuminating exactly where to look, what needs tending, what's ready to grow.

It's the body's way of circling things in red pen: pay attention here, love.

In my own life now, my strongest envies are tied to intellectual and creative achievements – groundbreaking research, paradigm-shifting writing, podcasts that make the heavy feel light. These are now precise coordinates on my personal map of possibility. For years, I dismissed these yearnings as impractical dreams, but envy kept pointing back to them with unwavering persistence.

Envy contains within it a blueprint for action. When we envy someone's achievement, we're unconsciously recognizing that it's within our realm of possibility. It's as if our psyche is saying, "This could be you." But perhaps more importantly, it's saying, "This should be you" – not in a moral sense, but in the sense of alignment with our deepest potential.

I'm learning to see envy as less of a deadly sin and more of a sacred messenger, carrying wisdom from the depths of our psyche to the surface of our awareness. When it arrives – and it still does, frequently and without invitation – I try to welcome it as I would an old friend who deals exclusively in difficult truths. Yes, sometimes these truths arrive with thorns. Sometimes they require me to confront the canyon between who I am and who I might become.

But, it turns out that gap is exactly where growth takes root.