A long time ago I realized that there are two types of envy, the good and the bad one. How can I divide envy in these two different types? OK, I will try to explain. Well…perhaps my point of view on this subject can be seen as wrong by those who don’t speak Portuguese. Perhaps there is another word for my “good envy” in English. But…it’s worth a try. ?
Is there anyone that you admire? Let’s say you admire your father (it could be your mother or anyone else). You admire him because he is a really nice person who loves helping other people. He is very smart and very funny. He always finds some time to give attention to you, to play with you. He is a very wise person, who always knows the right thing to be said, the right advice to be given, etc. You wonder if you will be so nice, smart, wise, etc. as your father is. You would like to be like him when you grow up and have your own family.
Well, that is GOOD ENVY. You admire someone for what he/she is/does/thinks, etc. You admire this person so much that you would like to be like him/her. I am not talking about wanting to become a clone of that person. I am talking about wanting to have the qualities of that person, since you think they are right.
Now let’s take a look on the other hand. I will use an extreme example, but everyone knows this kind of thing exists. Let’s say there’s a guy at your school/job that gets the attention of everyone. He is rich and you are not! You don’t get as much attention as he does. You would like to be like him, the one who is the center of attention. You would like to have all he has and don’t care about what you have to do to get it. You don’t care if what makes him so “special” are good things or not. You just want to be like him even if you have to change your behavior, the way you think, or worse, change your beliefs. What you want is, in short, to become a clone of that person!
So, for me it is obvious that this kind of thing is BAD ENVY. You don’t care about yourself. You are out to erase your beliefs to believe on what that persons believe. You are out to erase your own personality to “wear” that one. You are out to destroy what makes you YOU.
So, did you get the differences? What I am trying to show here is that ENVY is not a bad thing. The way you envy someone can be good or bad. I envy my father and mother for the way they treated my sisters and me, the way they educated us, the way they loved us. But I don’t have bad feelings because of this. I know who I am and don’t want to erase what I know is right about my personality. I just want to be as good as they were to me. I hope to be as wise as they were when they started educating my sisters and me. So I want to add to my personality the qualities of my parents. I don’t want to change mine, by erasing it and replacing with someone else’s.
Think about this carefully and realize what kind of envy you are using when you see or think about someone.
May the Force be with you all the time.