Unfinished Conversations

By Sonia Rebecca Menezes

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This is a painfully difficult essay to write. Just thinking about it is already obliterating my self-perception as a sweet little angel 😇 that only thinks happy, uplifting thoughts. But I need to do this. So here goes, let’s set this people pleaser on fire and see what she’s made of.

Hi friends and fellow goblins, today I’m writing an essay on envy, and I’ll do it even though my hands are shaking.

About a month ago, I did something I will never ever admit to doing in public, like if you ask me, I’ll straight up deny it, and if you show me a screenshot of this blog as proof I’ll take your phone and throw it in the dustbin i swear.

I commented something not-so-nice on a stranger’s Instagram reel. Aaaggghhhhhdkwjnkejfnqhbrkqr.

The reel was of a lady sorting through her closet, and there were captions describing something difficult she went through. And as it turns out, it was something I’d gone through before, so at the beginning I thought woah been there, hard relate. But then halfway through the video, she sets up her phone, sits on the floor, and cries. Like, sobs uncontrollably. More pieces of text appeared on the screen, as she shared what she felt. And when she was done crying, she wiped her face, got up, and collected herself and her phone. The end.

My first thought was, ‘Geez, why do people need to record themselves crying? It’s so weird and attention-seeking and performative. She could have read it out loud or basically done ANYTHING except straight-up bawling into a phone screen. So weird.’

And since the internet is generally a place where human decency goes to die, I gleefully opened the comments section to find all the people that had the same thought. I knew I’d find a few jokes in there too.

But to my surprise – I found nothing of the sort. Only supportive messages, people saying they cried with her, people saying they’re proud of her. And I thought WHAT, why does nobody else find this weird?! Why aren’t they telling her how weird it is?! Naturally, I had to investigate, maybe the reel didn’t have that many views, and it was just her friends and family commenting. I checked her profile, and HA – I was right. It had some 7k-ish views, which felt pretty piddly.

Backstory – here’s how I normally consume reels: I watch for a few seconds, and if I don’t like it, I scroll by really quick. If I do like it and have even a single thought about the content, I click on the comments to see if someone else feels the same. And then, I proceed to like the comments that I find funny/relatable. So when I ‘watch reels’, I’m actually just in the comments section looking for my people. This is also how I learn about internet culture, pop culture, and the general lack of culture found in both.

Now here’s the ick part. Since nobody said it, I left a comment saying:

‘It makes me uncomfortable when people record themselves crying.’

That’s it. No emojis, no nothing. I then checked to see if we had any mutual followers; we had none. It was all good. Nobody would ever find out that I, a shining beacon of love and kindness, was actually a troll. I moved on with my life, deliberately not thinking about that again.

*Cut to a week later*

I began getting a barrage of notifications. People were liking my comment. Nonstop. Replies to that comment were flying in. I realized what was happening – her reel was going viral. And along with it, my comment was going viral too. It had over 14,000 likes.

Nothing I have ever created on the internet has ever been validated by 14,000 people and this was deeply conflicting for many reasons. I think I understand the troll brain a little better, because there definitely was a weird glee that took over for a moment. 14,000 people thought this chick was so weird lol.

But the glee didn’t last long AT ALL because here’s the thing with online interactions – what might have been a fleeting thought to ME that I shared in the form of a comment, is now a permanent fixture on her video. And it’s all without context.

I considered deleting the comment many times, but a creepy curiosity held me back, compelling me to witness the circus unfolding. As expected, my comment became a platform from which others spewed their hate and vitriol, conveniently firing away from the shoulders of my thoughtless statement. They took aim and fired at both her, and, unsurprisingly, at me too.

I chose not to reply or engage with anything, but just sat at watched. And winced. People said awful things about her and how desperate it looks to just cry online and how we ought to bring bullying back. And then they came for me, assailing my character, branding me as judgmental, presumptuous, self-righteous — I’m softening the blow with my paraphrasing here.

I thought I’d last longer, but a day or so later, I deleted the comment. I had to put an end to the notifications, and I felt pretty crappy about the fact that I enabled this kind of behavior. My troll days were somewhat unfulfilling, but it gave me a lot to think about.

Troll analysis

Here’s the lots to think about:

• It does make me uncomfortable when people record themselves crying. Not lying there.
• I did have the option to shut up and scroll by, but I didn’t.
• I didn’t like the fact that she set up a camera and recorded herself crying.
• It felt inauthentic and attention-seeking.
• But when I opened the comments to find others that agreed with me, I saw only tons of support for the crier.
• That’s what irked me. But why?
• “Why can’t y’all see how performative this is??? She’s trying too hard, and y’all are just eating it up,” I thought.
• Did I think she was faking it? No, I’ve been through something similar before, and I cried a fair bit too, just not on camera.
• Do I take issue with people being authentic and vulnerable online?
• No. I’ve dedicated a whole blog to it.
• Did I think she was being inauthentic?
• Yeah, but why should that trigger me? Do I also comment on the Kardashians’ accounts because they’re inauthentic?
• Was this person really ‘trying too hard to get attention?’
• Let’s imagine two people sharing some vulnerable part of their lives online.
• One person feels the pain, cries, records a part of it, edits a video, and posts it.
• The other (say, me) feels the pain, probably cries too, thinks about it, overthinks, writes three thousand words, designs carousel Instagram posts, uploads the essay on WordPress and the posts on Instagram and then takes 37 screenshots and uploads them to their story.
• Now I could be wrong but clearly ONE of these two people is definitely trying harder here.
• So then, was I just envious of the fact that someone can ‘try’ less and still hit home and resonate with people?
• Was I envious of the fact that someone felt brave enough to share their pain in such an unfiltered way, while I feel so nervous about sharing any of my vulnerabilities?
• The existence of her video didn’t actually affect me at all.
• My issue with it was only that it reminded me of my own self-consciousness.
• Was I, in fact, just jEeaALLoUs?

gross.

“You’re just jealous”

If you’ve ever expressed an opinion about someone only to be countered with, ‘You’re just jealous,’ you understand the immediate flare of irritation and defensiveness that it triggers. It straight-up negates what you’re feeling and reduces you to a small rat in a hole that you have to jump out of immediately. Nobody wants to be known as a person that’s jealous of someone. It’s bad optics. It’s cringe.

And while jealousy and envy aren’t the same thing, they’re used pretty interchangeably. On the spectrum of human emotions, envy is one of the more prickly ones. It’s self-inflicted torment. As my senior editor Aristotle defines it: Envy is pain at the fortune of others. Unlike jealousy, which is defensive and protective of what’s ours, envy is distinctly offensive.

It isn’t the mere wanting of what others have – that could be admiration or aspiration – envy is angered by what someone else has that we don’t. It’s hating on anyone else for having something that we want.

While doing some research for this essay, I chanced upon a video by the iconic philosopher and video essay QUEEN Natalie Wynn and her YouTube channel ContraPoints. The video honestly unpacks envy SO WELL that I almost considered junking this entire essay and was tempted to redirect everyone to watch the video instead.

But after watching her video, pondering on my own recent encounter with envy, and doing a couple of hundred hours of thinking, I have a few observations and thoughts about the subject of envy.

Here goes.

Envy is everywhere

We love giving envy cute nicknames to spare ourselves the awkwardness of confronting it, but there are traces of it everywhere you look. It’s like finding cat fur on your black trousers, and then more fur on your sofa, and then some more fur on your bed and pillow.

At first you’re like aww, cat fur. And then you realize that you don’t actually have a cat, and then you realize that it’s actually RAT fur from the rat that jumped out of the hole I was talking about earlier and now you’re objectively friggin HORRIFIED!!!!!!

Which is how I feel now, every time I see those rat-fur strands of envy all over my thoughts, opinions, and interactions these days.

One of the examples that Natalie uses in her video is that of Cain and Abel in the Bible. They’re the first ‘peers’ (because they’re siblings), and Cain ends up killing Abel on account of envy. The idea that envy was the motive behind the first documented murder in the Bible is pretty wild.

This points to the darker facets of human nature that we can’t easily romanticize or beautify. It means that every individual you’ve encountered has grappled with envy in one form or another. Often, when we discuss our imperfections, we present them as if we’re in a job interview for which we’re not quite qualified. We may say things like, “I overthink,” or “I’m too honest.” Yet, how many of us willingly confess to harboring envy? It’s certainly not the most flattering self-admission. It’s just not a good look.

Once you start looking for envy, it’s everywhere: it’s in the collective disdain we had at celebrities during COVID trying to project relatability from their mansions, it’s in the refusal to support student debt cancellation because “I had to pay for college”; it’s in the way the public turns on celebrities as soon as they get too popular; it’s in the way we feel smug when someone is taken down a peg even if we stand nothing to gain from their downfall.

“The basic logic of envy is: If I can’t have it, no one can, which is a purely negative, destructive style of thinking. It’s taking privileges away not for the material benefit of the underprivileged, but merely for the psychological satisfaction of the envious person. And that’s even worse when you consider that envy is subjective. It doesn’t necessarily target objective power and privilege.”

Natalie Wynn

Envy is everywhere but we all pretend it isn’t

Being envious is embarrassing. And we don’t want to deal with that, so we run away as fast as we can – not from being envious – but from calling envy by its name. And because we’ve refused to acknowledge envy in our lives, we don’t know how to recognize that well. We see the rat fur all over, and we eventually start seeing rat poop too, but we act baffled by it.

To quote directly from Natalie’s essay here:

“There’s two reasons why people are usually in denial about their own envy: one is guilt and the other is shame. Shame because admitting to yourself that you envy someone implies that you feel inferior to them, which is shameful. And guilt because envy is malicious. If you envy someone you may feel angry and miserable about their success and good fortune, and you may wish to see them ruined or brought down. That’s cruel and anti-social.

It goes against most ideas of morality, and it’s a thought that’s usually not socially acceptable to admit. So envy is shameful, guilty, and socially unacceptable. And we deal with that by suppressing it from our awareness. But it is still there, and in order to maintain the denial, we have to convince ourselves that this angry, resentful feeling in the pit of our stomach is actually something else.”

There are so many ways that we mask our envy at different situations and people. We see someone our age that has accomplished more than we have, and we immediately assign it to their rich parents. We see a happy couple posting on social media, and assume that they’re overcompensating for the actual cracks in their relationship.

We see someone that’s childfree and happy, and assume their lives are missing something. We see someone excel at their corporate jobs and tell ourselves that we could never be a sell-out. We see two pretty girls hang out together and assume they’re chasing clout.

The bottom line is that envy makes us feel inferior, and since we don’t like that gross feeling, our brains recalibrate the sting of envy into a sense of moral superiority (a concept called sublimation, if you want to impress your psychology grad friend with some jargon)

Moral superiority is an easy place to hide, especially for people with nothing else to actually feel superior about. There’s no need for us to shoulder the burden of guilt or shame associated with envy if we manage to persuade ourselves that what we’re truly experiencing is righteous and therefore, defensible.

My own feeling of envy was obscured from my eyes when I typed that comment because in that moment, not only did I feel superior for having been through something similar and not being such a teary mess about it, but I also believed that someone processing it in public, or ‘for the gram’ must certainly have questionable motives. They must be chasing clout.

Envy is everywhere but we all pretend it isn’t but it shows up anyway

As someone that spends a lot of time online, I have to exercise considerable caution when it comes to my feed and what I see. It’s the only way I stay somewhat sane and unaffected by everything and everyone around me, and their perfect, enviable lives. I know how easily admiration can morph into envy, I’ve been there before and it’s just plain crappy.

Before I found myself in this rat-hole of envy research, I used to process envy in a silly, but what I now realize is a pretty effective way. I’d simply tell myself to aim higher. 

By that, I mean, if someone at work got a promotion, and I lowkey felt crappy about it, I’d think: Why waste those ugly feelings on them? Envy the CEO instead. Or better still, envy the CEO’s teenage son who doesn’t have to work for a paycheck and has their Dad’s money to enjoy. And why stop there? I’d think of people that don’t have to grind because they’ve inherited a trust fund. I’d go further and further up the chain of privilege until I’d usually take aim at some random Middle Eastern sheikh’s wife, before eventually settling on envying Melinda Gates because how do you top that?

At this point, what started out as an ugly feeling would transform into something silly and pointless. I’d look at the colleague that got the promotion and feel unexpected camaraderie, realizing that we are both in the gutter looking up at the stars. If you must endure the pang of envy, it’s wise to aim higher. Be ambitious.

Again, to quote Natalie here (I’ll be doing this a lot)

“We form our sense of identity and self-worth not by comparing ourselves to any absolute standard, but by comparing ourselves to each other. And we’re more likely to compare ourselves to the people who are around us than we are to people who are far away.”

She presents the paradox of happiness in sports, talking about why bronze medalists often appear happier than those that win silver. Silver medalists, when reflecting on their performance, are most likely to consider the tantalizing prospect of having won gold.

But bronze medalists tend to consider the stark alternative of not having won a medal at all. TIME friggin Magazine wrote a great article on this if you wanna read, it’s based on the findings of the original study by Medvec, Madey, and Gilovich (1995) which is also here if you wanna read

Envy is everywhere but we all pretend it isn’t but it shows up anyway so NOW WHAT?

Are we all truly ‘jUsT JeALouS’ and therefore incapable of seeing anything objectively? Can we, while caught up in a web of envy, actually form any unbiased opinions? Are our critiques of others’ actions just manifestations of our saltiness?

I think not.

Just because envy clouds our judgment, it does not invalidate our critique, nor should one’s enviable status shield them from justified scrutiny. We should, however, remember that our critique will be more valid and sensible when it isn’t merely a cover for something else.

While I’m sure this essay will help us identify when others might be acting out of envy, I really want for us to be aware of our own envy. Especially when we think we’re justified in feeling morally superior to others, because envy is a lousy moral compass that leads us to short-term, punitive solutions rather than actual helpful ones.

To acknowledge our envy can seem immoral, but the real immorality lies in pretending we don’t feel it at all. Envy, in its ratty and icky form, is a potent bias that can mess up our ability to see things clearly. But denying its existence means denying a critical aspect of our humanity, which is our inherent dissatisfaction and endless yearning for more. 

In my experience, the only antidote to envy I’ve discovered is – and here’s where it gets predictably wholesome – gratitude. Gratitude is powerful, and just like many powerful things, it can be pretty annoying.

It’s that nagging knowledge of what we should do, but often resist. Like going to bed on time so we get enough sleep. Or exercising. Gratitude demands intentional, everyday practice – it’s not the quick-fix solution we often crave.

When we practice gratitude, especially in the face of discontentment or righteous anger or moral superiority or disdain, or any of the other envy alter-egos, we find that our perspective shifts. Like the bronze medalist that realizes they were so close to not being on the podium at all, gratitude helps us shift our grumpy human gaze to what we have instead of the people that have more.

Choosing gratitude can be especially painful and difficult when you’re in the middle of an envy-spiral. It’s a bit like swallowing a large, bitter pill of self-reflection, but I promise you, the aftertaste of contentment is worth it.

Side note – When I deleted the comment, I sent that girl a DM telling her that I was sorry. We had a kind, respectful, and wholesome exchange of messages and it felt really good to wrap things up that way.

This wasn’t my first encounter with envy, and it probably won’t be my last. I know that in the past, I’ve handled it much more poorly and while I can’t go back and make amends for all of it, I hope I can do better in the future. I hope we all can.

PS: Watch Natalie Wynn’s video here ⬇️