스크립트
00:00:00Today's episode is about a really unfortunate part of life, one that sucks the joy out of day-to-day
00:00:06existence on an all-too-regular basis, and that's envy, the happiness killer. You know, I talk to
00:00:11people all the time who they wanted to have kids, for example, and they couldn't have kids, and they
00:00:15see people with kids, and it's just they're filled with this betterness as a result of that, or they
00:00:19had a dream of other careers, and their dream just never came true, and they see people who don't
00:00:24deserve the success and who have it are just consumed by that envy, and it's a really terrible
00:00:29thing. Why? Why do we have it? What's the basis of it? But more importantly, for the envies in your
00:00:34life, terrible or not so terrible, intense or mild, what can you do to actually manage that envy and
00:00:42maybe even turn it into something beneficial? That's what we're talking about today.
00:00:52Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is our show about love and happiness,
00:00:57and the science that can actually bring those ideas and those concepts more to your life and
00:01:02more to the lives of other people. I am a happiness teacher. I teach at Vanderbilt University. For the
00:01:07last seven years, I was at Harvard University, bringing it to some of the greatest students in
00:01:11the world, but more importantly, I'm trying to bring these ideas to a much wider audience, which is why I
00:01:15do this show. Fundamentally, I want you to have more love and happiness in your life, but almost as
00:01:21importantly, I want you to become a happiness teacher and bring it to other people for two reasons.
00:01:25Number one is that builds a better world. That gives us leverage. That's why I'm using this incredible
00:01:31platform of modern media to do it, but also because one of the things that I know is that in the world
00:01:37of self-improvement, insights are no match for habits, and habits only come when we share ideas
00:01:43with others. It's really interesting, isn't it? If you want to do something consistently in your life,
00:01:48you got to teach other people about it. If you want to go to the gym, you got to make it a habit,
00:01:52and the best way to make it a habit is by teaching other people how to work out, and so that's really
00:01:57what I'm talking about in my work. I want you to join me in the movement of happy happiness professors,
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00:03:32retreats.arthurbrooks.com. All right. Today's episode is about a really unfortunate part of life that is a very
00:03:41natural part of life, but one that sucks the joy out of day-to-day existence on an all too regular basis, and
00:03:48that's envy. Envy, the happiness killer. I want to talk about that today because I've
00:03:55thought about it an awful lot, in no small part, because I, like every other person in the world, have
00:04:01experienced it. I saw a poll a few years ago. I can't remember actually who sponsored it. It was an
00:04:07industry poll, you know, put out by, you know, some company, probably pretty reputable. I don't know
00:04:12why it wouldn't be, but it was along the following lines. What's the first thing that you notice when
00:04:19you meet somebody of your same gender and age? What's the first thing that you notice? And the answers
00:04:25were all over the map, but here's the first thing that bald men notice when they look at men their
00:04:31own age who aren't bald hair, the first thing they notice. And the first feeling that they have when
00:04:38they see a guy, a bald man sees, when he sees somebody his own age who's got a full head of
00:04:41hair is that, right? It's a little tiny bit of resentment. It's envy. And a lot of us are like,
00:04:51I don't care. We care, right? I mean, not that much. It shouldn't animate your whole existence.
00:04:55And I don't recommend going to absurd lengths to it, unless it's a joke, by the way. I mean,
00:05:00my dad was a cue ball just like me. And my dad had a great sense of self-effacing humor. He had a
00:05:06toupee that he would wear sometimes. I remember at one point he was getting ready for, he was a
00:05:12lecturer like me and he was a university professor. It was like me. One day he's getting, I was a
00:05:15teenager. He's getting ready to go, you know, teach a class. And he's looking at himself in the mirror
00:05:19while he's fixing his tie. And he looks at himself and he says, you know, I think that tie needs hair.
00:05:24And he opened up his closet. He took out his toupee and put it on when lectured. And I could just
00:05:29imagine the horrified, amused students that he was teaching where Professor Brooks shows up with hair.
00:05:36So good. If you're willing to be so self-effacing to have a good sense of humor about it, that's
00:05:41fantastic. But there is envy and something even as dumb as that. More seriously, you know, sometimes I
00:05:46feel envy because I meet people all the time who are smarter, more skillful than me in, in the
00:05:53intellectual pursuits that I really value. Something that I think is, are really, really good. It's
00:05:58tinged by admiration, of course. And I'm going to talk about the relationship between admiration and envy
00:06:03as we move on in this episode. But, but I'm not, I'm not immune from that. None of us is immune from
00:06:10that. And that's one of the weird parts of life because it doesn't make us happy. On the contrary,
00:06:17why is this misery provoking thing happening to people all the time? And my little envies are
00:06:22nothing compared to the envies that many people feel. You know, I talk to people all the time who
00:06:26they wanted to have kids, for example, and they couldn't have kids and they see people with kids
00:06:30and it's just, they're filled with this betterness as a result of that. It is, and it animates them or,
00:06:35or they had a dream of other careers and their dream just never came true. And they see people who
00:06:40don't deserve the success and who have it are just consumed by that envy. And it's a really terrible
00:06:46thing. Why? Why do we have it? What's the basis of it? But more importantly, for the envies in your
00:06:52life, terrible or not so terrible, intense or mild, what can you do to actually manage that envy and
00:07:01maybe even turn it into something beneficial? That's what we're talking about today.
00:07:06Now, there's nothing new about the concept of envy as the happiness killer. Most of you,
00:07:12if you haven't read it, you know an awful lot about Dante's Divine Comedy. This is this great
00:07:17medieval Italian work. It's one of the three most read books in Italian is Dante's Divine Comedy.
00:07:26If you want to know what the other two are, you know what the other two are? Machiavelli's The Prince
00:07:30and Pinocchio. So now you know. The three most popular books in Italian. A little side, you know,
00:07:37this is just, just in case anybody who watches Office Hours is going to be contested on Jeopardy,
00:07:42you can send me half the proceeds. But in Dante's Divine Comedy, the 13th Canto of Purgatorio,
00:07:50the Divine Comedy is three books. The Inferno, which you're most familiar with, Purgatorio,
00:07:56and then there's Purgatorio. So it's hell, purgatory, and heaven. And in the 13th Canto,
00:08:02the second book in Purgatory, the Italian poet Dante, he describes the punishments of different
00:08:09people for different kinds of sins. Now, you probably know that envy in classical Christianity
00:08:15is considered to be, is classified as one of the seven deadly sins. There's seven deadly sins.
00:08:22It's the second worst. The worst is pride. Now, pride is the sin of the devil, right? And in Dante's
00:08:28Divine Comedy, the devil is consumed by pride. And that's represented as, you know, the bottom of the
00:08:35pit of hell isn't filled with fire. And the bottom of the pit of hell, Satan is down there. And he's,
00:08:41you know, he's got flapping his, his awful wings, but he's frozen up to his waist in a block of ice
00:08:48in, in the Divine Comedy. And that ice is, it represents his being frozen in place by his own
00:08:55pride, by his own intense interest in himself, which makes it impossible for him to free himself.
00:09:01To be free is to be liberated, to be happy. And he can't because this pride is like a block of ice.
00:09:07And, and, and he's in agony. So he's flapping his wings fruitlessly. And all it's doing is,
00:09:13is freezing the air and making the block of ice more solid. And he, and he's so consumed by his
00:09:19pride that he doesn't even notice that Dante, the author is, is going down there with, with actually
00:09:26his guide is Virgil, the, the, the, the Roman poet. And they go down and Virgil is explaining to him
00:09:33that this is pride and this is the devil and the devil doesn't even see him. So the devil does,
00:09:35doesn't hurt him at all because pride distracts you. Anyway, I digress. The second worst,
00:09:41which comes from pride is envy. Your pride about yourself makes you envious of other people who have
00:09:47things that, that you don't, whether they, they're, they're ill gotten or, or, or, or, or earned.
00:09:55When you're prideful about yourself, you'll be envious of other people. That's what the,
00:09:59the, the great poet taught. Now, what's the punishment for envy? The second worst of the
00:10:05deadly sins. And the, the, in Mount Purgatory, he finds all the envious people, the most envious
00:10:11people. And you know, what he does in this is he, you know, he names famous people throughout history
00:10:15who had this, but it's, it's supposed to represent you. If this is your defining sin,
00:10:20that they're all, it's a, that these are people who are in a dark, dark, dark cave. They're all
00:10:25clustered on the side of a sheer cliff and to avoid falling into the pit below them, they have
00:10:31to hold each other up, which envious people never did in ordinary life. They never helped each other
00:10:36in ordinary life, but they have to, they have to hold each other up and be held up, which is agony.
00:10:42If you were consumed by envy and their eyes are wired shut, their eyes are wired shut because,
00:10:50you know, envy started with what they saw around them. So they can't see anything. It's,
00:10:55it's really descriptive. It's sort of awful in its way. Now that's a pretty grim punishment to be
00:11:01sure, but you know, the punishment in real life is plenty bad. You know, I'll, I'll, I'll give you
00:11:08some statistics in a minute about the, the correlation between envy and depression, envy and anxiety.
00:11:13It takes the life out of life. And so you don't, don't worry about hell later. It's hell now is what
00:11:18it comes down to. And that's one of the reasons, by the way, that probably that envy is in,
00:11:23in the 10 commandments. It's a sin that, that gets two commandments. You know, you're not, you're just,
00:11:28you're not supposed to be lusting after your neighbor's wife and you're not supposed to be
00:11:31trying to get your neighbor's stuff. I mean, stick to your own knitting, man. Don't envy your
00:11:37neighbor is what it comes down to, but two, not just one, because it's considered to be so bad,
00:11:41so bad for society, so bad for the world, so bad for, so bad for you. Okay. Now let's define it
00:11:50because, you know, let's define our terms here before we can actually get somewhere near a solution
00:11:54to the problem of envy. Envy is defined by social scientists as the resentful longing for what someone
00:12:02else possesses. Okay. Not just the longing for what somebody else possesses, but the resentful longing.
00:12:09In other words, then the negative emotion around that gives you a little bit of hell or purgatory
00:12:15right now is the envy. It's, it sort of sours relationships because it makes you like people
00:12:21less because of the success that they have. It brings out spite. It brings out real ugliness in
00:12:27people. And it actually gives you pleasure in the suffering of others, which has this great German
00:12:31word schadenfreude, which means joy in the suffering of others. Joy in the suffering of others is always
00:12:36is based in envy because it has to do with a resentful, a resentful longing is what we actually
00:12:43see. When people's good fortune makes ours feel insufficient by comparison. There's a great essayist
00:12:51by the name of Joseph Epstein. Many of you know his work. Shows up in the Wall Street Journal a lot,
00:12:55but he was a professor at the University of Chicago for a long time. And, and he said, he wrote a book
00:13:01on envy, a little book by that's, I'll put it in the show notes called envy in Oxford University Press.
00:13:06And here's this great quote of the seven deadly sins. Only envy is no fun at all. So lust, you know,
00:13:13greed, gluttony, kind of fun is his point. Envy, not even fun. It hurts you. It hurts the world.
00:13:21It's bad. It's sinful. In other words, it's just the worst because it's based not just on longing,
00:13:27but on resentment as well. Now, why do we, why does it exist? Why would this actually exist?
00:13:34Most of these weird things that we do has a, an evolutionary biological basis to it.
00:13:40This is the modus operandi of all of my analysis always is, okay, where did it come from? And why
00:13:46is it still around? Why was it not eliminated over hundreds and thousands of generations of,
00:13:53of human development? You know, why didn't sexual selection get rid of it? Why weren't envious people
00:13:58bred out of, bred out of society? And there's some reason that it kind of persists. And ordinarily,
00:14:04you have to look for a reason that, that it came into being for the first place. You got to find the
00:14:09benefit of it, you know, whatever it happens to be. There's no benefit to baldness, by the way.
00:14:14So what is it about envy that would have been naturally evolved? And the answer is this.
00:14:20Envy is based on social comparison, social comparison, me versus you, how am I doing compared
00:14:26to how well you are doing is really natural because that's how we gauge our relative place in society.
00:14:32It shows us where we stand. Now it's all relative in this way. You know, if you're living in a
00:14:37country where the average income per year is $6,000 a year, you're going to look at yourself
00:14:42with respect to $6,000, more than $6,000, less than $6,000, more or less. But if you live in the
00:14:48United States, it's going to be really different, which is one of the reasons that generation after
00:14:51generation, unambiguously people have been getting richer, but we always find some reason to be really,
00:14:56really resentful. Right now, for example, real estate is ruinously expensive in most major
00:15:01metropolitan areas. And so that's what people fixate on, despite the fact that virtually all
00:15:06technology and healthcare and transportation and all these things are cheaper and easier and better
00:15:12and jobs pay more and we have more per capita consumption in almost every way. People are always
00:15:17like, yeah, no, life's worse because, you know, sucks that houses are so expensive. Why? Because that's
00:15:22what we do is we gauge our own prosperity and success with respect to the benchmark around us. And that's
00:15:29highly contextual and social. It's all based on how well other people, how well am I doing? I don't
00:15:35know. How well are you doing? And I'll be able to say. We do that because going back to approximately
00:15:41250,000 years ago, when all human beings lived in band, virtually all humans lived in bands of 30 to
00:15:4750 individuals who are kin-based and hierarchical, we needed to know what it meant to stay competitive.
00:15:54We needed to know what it meant to be a successful person, to be, to be, to have the resources that
00:15:59would make us viable to not starve and to protect ourselves and get mates. Those are the three things
00:16:04we wanted fundamentally is to don't starve, right? Survive the night, don't get eaten by animals or
00:16:11killed by another tribe and find mates. You know, these are these biological imperatives that go back
00:16:16and are super, super hardwired into us. And we're going to have more success doing that if we have
00:16:21higher prestige, higher resources, if we're just simply doing better. To know that, we have to compare
00:16:26ourselves to other people on the basis of social comparison. That's part one. Part two is not just
00:16:32knowing that information, but, you know, an inborn desire to act on that information, to get better.
00:16:40You're going to be more successful. You'll have an impetus to be more successful. If you want more,
00:16:46more what? More mates, more food, more security. And how do I know how much is enough? I'm comparing
00:16:53myself to you. Now, if you have more than me, it means I need to have an incentive to want to get
00:17:00ahead and to get more. That social comparison is invidious in that case. It makes me want to
00:17:06climb. And that's envy. This is the reason that the emotion of envy is actually evolved and sticks
00:17:13with us. It enhances our reproductive and security fitness. That's what it comes down to. Don't want
00:17:20it to be the case. But we are made to build ourselves up and or to tear other people down.
00:17:27Now, building yourself up is a lot better than tearing other people down. But remember, when
00:17:30you're in a social hierarchy, either will actually do. And there's lots of jokes that come from that.
00:17:35My wonderful dad, now of a very blessed memory, he died in 2002. He used to say,
00:17:42you know, son, it's not enough to win. Your friends have to lose too. And that wasn't my dad's
00:17:49attitude. My dad was not an overly envious person. But that was a remark on the human condition. Not bad
00:17:55for a man with a PhD in biostat and was a math professor. He was a really adroit behavioral scientist,
00:18:00I have to say. Now, all of this stuff of building ourselves up or tearing ourselves down where life
00:18:05or death and troglodyte times, they serve us to a certain extent now, but they can also be
00:18:10anachronistic and maladapted in modern times. You're unlikely to, you know, walk the frozen tundra
00:18:16and die alone because your social media posts are less popular than others, because you have fewer
00:18:21Instagram followers than your friends. But we still have his impulse, impulse, impulse, because it's
00:18:27hardwired into us. That's where it comes from. Okay, now, what have we done? Defined envy, number one
00:18:34is, I hope I made the case that people are envious. We've defined envy, number two. We've talked about
00:18:41why it exists. Now let's actually talk about the different kinds of envy. There's two kinds of envy,
00:18:46benign and malicious. Okay, you can, of course, this is how it makes perfect sense, that some of it would
00:18:52be really, really bad and some less so. And it's, we have a lot of studies on this. There's a really
00:18:59good study I'll put in the show notes on this paper, an emotion review called Envy and Adversarial
00:19:04Review in Comparison of Two Competing Views. And so this is a really, really nice overview. It's from
00:19:092020, so it's not that ancient a paper as well. It talks about the differences between benign and
00:19:14malicious envy. Benign envy, it can be miserable, but it can also lead you to better things. Benign
00:19:20envy occurs when you believe that admiration for another person is deserved. So if you look at a
00:19:25war hero and you're just really envious of that person's courage and virtues, and by the way, you're
00:19:31also envious of their, of the admiration that other people give them. You're envious of the social
00:19:38prestige that they've gotten from their meritorious behavior. That's benign envy. And benign is benign.
00:19:43I mean, I mean, it might not make you super happy, but it's fundamentally benign with respect to the
00:19:48social destructiveness that that can actually bring. There's a, there's a really interesting
00:19:52paper on benign envy. I'll also put in the show notes from Frontiers in Psychology, which is really
00:19:57an apex journal in psychology called The Role of Subjective and Objective Social Status in the
00:20:02Generation of Envy. So a lot of it is really benign and it can serve a productive purpose in your life
00:20:08because it can give you a desire for self-improvement. It can give you a desire to emulate the
00:20:12envied person. And I remember this all at different points in my life. You know, most of the envy that
00:20:17I have of people who have more skill in me, that gives me an impulse, even at my, you know, I'm not
00:20:24a kid anymore, to keep learning, keep learning, keep learning, read more, study more, get better at
00:20:30what I do, get better at podcasting, get better at giving speeches on stage, all the things that I do.
00:20:35And that's one of the reasons that I, I don't lean into the sense of envy, but I do pay attention to
00:20:41the work of the people that I actually envy. I want to get better. I want to cultivate my desire
00:20:46benign envy into something good in a second when I get to the prescription, prescriptions part of this
00:20:57podcast. When I was a musician back in the old days, all the way through my twenties, I was a
00:21:01professional French horn player. I had pictures of some of the greatest horn players in the world on my
00:21:05wall and I envied them. I envied their success. I wanted their success, but it was a benign envy that,
00:21:10that gave me the impulse to do better as a matter of fact. Now that's in contrast to malicious envy
00:21:16about which there's nothing good to say that leads to wholly destructive actions, hostile thoughts,
00:21:22behavior intended to harm other people. Malicious envy is based on an envy of people that you don't
00:21:30believe actually earned what they have. They have what you want, but they didn't earn it in your view.
00:21:35Now you might be wrong, but that's really, really common as well. Like, you know, look,
00:21:39I can't believe she's getting all those roles in those movies and I'm just as good as an actress
00:21:43as she is. And I'm just as beautiful as she is. And wouldn't it be great if she, you know,
00:21:49if her, if her wonderful husband had an affair and left her, that's where schadenfreude comes in.
00:21:54Malicious envy is this resentment in the longing. It's more resentment even than longing as a matter of
00:22:00fact. And it makes you want bad things to happen, hostile thoughts. And, and, and, and you enjoy it
00:22:05when harm actually comes to the other person. When people get ahead unjustly, then you have a sense
00:22:12of malicious envy. We see a lot of us in politics today, as a matter of fact, because there's so much
00:22:16political polarization. And when the other side actually wins elections, a lot of the incredible
00:22:21hostility, you know, I want to do anything I can to see if I can find some sort of a scandal.
00:22:26And wouldn't it be wonderful if my political enemies went to jail? A lot of that is motivated
00:22:30by malicious envy. As a matter of fact, not just this was bad for America. That's a smokescreen
00:22:35a lot of the time. I mean, maybe true, you decide, but malicious envy is way more powerful than your
00:22:42benevolence toward your beloved country. On the contrary, it will motivate you and focus you in a
00:22:47way that, that those positive cognitions and emotions never will, as a matter of fact. So, so you as a
00:22:54fellow observer of human behavior, be on the lookout for malicious envy in the, in the conversations
00:22:59that you have with politics, about politics and see it yourself and curb it in the ways I'll talk
00:23:04about here in a second, but also recognize it in the way that people are talking about political
00:23:10actors on social media. You'll also recognize it a lot when people just love it when the mighty fall. I
00:23:16mean, we have a natural tendency to kind of want to suck up to celebrities and, you know,
00:23:21people who are just actors, you don't really think that they're so great, but if you're around them
00:23:26and they, and they want to be friends with you, like, oh, that's awesome. You know, so-and-so,
00:23:30a famous actor wants to be friends with me and you probably are, would, would want that. But if you
00:23:36never knew that person and they're just an actor and something bad happens to them, you might enjoy
00:23:40it. That that's a complicated thing, right? I would love it if they were my friend, but I enjoy it if they
00:23:44fall. What's that all about? And what that's all about is the longing on one side and the resentment
00:23:50on the other. And that's the essence of the malicious envy. You have that in you, which is
00:23:55why you have that kind of conflict that's actually going on for you as well. You're enjoying some
00:24:00handsome Hollywood actor's ninth divorce. That's malicious envy. It's terrible for you. It's really
00:24:07terrible for you. There's it. Malicious envy is just awful for you as a person. Super interesting paper
00:24:13from, from science. Once again, one of the greatest journals out there called, "When your gain is my
00:24:19pain and your pain is my gain, neural correlates of envy and schadenfreude is on the nose, man." And
00:24:24what it looks at is the effects of the brain when you're feeling envy. What happens is that envying
00:24:30other people stimulates the brain's anterior cingulate cortex. Again, if you follow my work closely,
00:24:35you know that I talk a lot about the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is one of the affective pain
00:24:40centers of the brain. When you're feeling aggrieved and sad and rejected and, and, and you're feeling
00:24:46mental pain, that's the anterior cingulate cortex of your brain is highly active in those moments.
00:24:51You have an onboard pain center so that you will be averse to negative experiences so that you'll
00:24:58try not to do the things that actually bring you to sadness because generally speaking, they're not
00:25:01good to you. Envy lights up those pain centers of your brain. It, in other words, pain hurts. Also,
00:25:09there's research on, on how it affects your future. There's scholars writing in social science and
00:25:14medicine. Very nice journal. Uh, they looked at 18,000, big sample, randomly selected individuals and found
00:25:20that their experience of envy predicted in the future, worse mental health, more depression and more
00:25:25anxiety and just lower overall happiness. In other words, envy now has a cost later. And this is one of
00:25:34the reasons that it's so important that we, that we'd be teaching our kids appropriately, uh, proper
00:25:39techniques for emotional self-management and we manage the way that they use social media. Social
00:25:44media is an envy machine. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a second, but it's also really,
00:25:49really bad for the mental health of kids going into their adulthood. If your kids are just super
00:25:53envious because of their use of social media and glamorous people and successful people. And
00:25:58you know, the influencers who have tons of stupid stuff, like, I don't know, followers on social
00:26:03media, who cares? Your kids do then. And they, and they indulge that envy, you know, unalloyed because
00:26:10of their unrestricted access to social media and screens. And, and also because you don't talk to
00:26:14them about how important it is that they get away from that. They will have mental, worst mental health
00:26:19in the future, according to this research, and they'll be unhappier people as adults. You're training
00:26:24your brain to feel more pain, train the brain to feel more pain. Sorry. I'm not trying to do poetry
00:26:31here, but you get the point that I'm trying to make. Okay. So ordinarily, people get psychologically
00:26:37healthier as they get older. I've talked about that a lot on the show. Your personality gets better. You
00:26:41get more agreeable, more conscientious. You get more assertive in positive ways. You tend to be more
00:26:47open to experience, at least until your mid fifties. You tend to get less neurotic as you get older. You
00:26:53tend to be less anxious and less depressed. Many people are, are, are pretty much healed from lifelong
00:26:59depression just through the passage of time. Because as people get older, they get better,
00:27:04unless they're envious. Envy is one of the best ways for you not to get mentally healthier as you
00:27:10get older. And that's why it's so critically important that all of my young friends who are
00:27:14watching this today, that you learn how to manage your envy, that you learn how to manage this part of
00:27:19your life. Envy that runs out of control will ruin the happiness benefit that should be your future.
00:27:26that's the stakes that we talk about right now. You're like Neo in the matrix. You can keep scrolling,
00:27:33experiencing a simulation of life, or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for
00:27:40profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like
00:27:45this anymore. But it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your
00:27:51dopamine system. Just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings. You're addicted. You don't
00:27:57like it, and I don't either. But I can't just tell you to stop doing it. That's hard. If you want to
00:28:01break free from the system, you need an incentive. Here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that
00:28:07pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile. It pays you to
00:28:14use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns
00:28:19incentives with what's good for you. Use less data, earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living
00:28:26once again in real life, and you're going to like how it feels. Now, before we get into the solutions to
00:28:32this, I want to talk about what people envy because I think this is really interesting and useful.
00:28:36Different people envy different things. I envy cognitive horsepower and hair, I guess. I envy
00:28:45other things as well, and I'm making too much out of the hair part, but you get my point.
00:28:49There's been a lot of people that people envy, but then I don't. For example, I mean,
00:28:54I can see people with a fancy boat or a car all day long, or golf clubs, and I'll be like, "I don't
00:28:59care. I could not care less." I'm like, "Save me from owning a boat." I mean, it's just like,
00:29:04"I could not care less." But there are general patterns that are actually what we see in.
00:29:09The reason I tell you this is I want you to catalog your envy. Before we get into the solutions,
00:29:13I want you to understand it. So I want you, before you do the homework I'm going to give you in a
00:29:17minute, I want you to think, "Okay, what do I envy?" I want you to write it down. I want you to write down in
00:29:22order the three or four things that you envy the most. Know thyself. If you honestly know your faults,
00:29:29you're going to be in a position of power to deal with them. So young people are more, generally
00:29:36speaking, well, envious of older people. Okay. So, you know, young adults rather than older adults
00:29:41at the following four things. Educational success. Okay. People who are my age are generally not very
00:29:49envious of younger people or anybody who has more degrees. Social success. You envy that less as you get
00:29:57older. So you've got that to look forward to. Good looks. I mean, it matters, but it matters less
00:30:02when you get older. And romantic fortune. You know, one of the things that you find is when people in
00:30:06their sixties, it is what it is. So you might envy those things, but young people are most
00:30:13generally consumed by resource and reproductive cues. If somebody else has more resource cues to attract
00:30:20mates and to attract resources than you, you don't like it. And when somebody has more reproductive
00:30:26fitness cues, they're more attractive. They're more likely to be attractive to the other members of
00:30:32the species. They don't like that either. Obviously, men and women envy different qualities. You find
00:30:39that men are most likely to envy social status and prestige. Why? Because as David Buss, the university
00:30:46of Texas at Austin has written clearly, men are most attractive to women, especially young men to young
00:30:54women when they exhibit a lot of resource cues. I can drag in gazelles one after the other. That's what
00:30:59makes them really, really attractive. So social status and prestige are a way to show that. And so they're
00:31:04really most envious of other young men in particular, but men in general, of men who have higher social
00:31:09status and higher prestige. Women, on the other hand, are more resentful of, have more resentful longing
00:31:17with respect to women who are more physically attractive. That's what you find. Now, that's
00:31:22just a pattern that has to do with the fact that their reproductive cues are different. This is
00:31:28biological evolution as well. Older people are more envious of each other just with the amount of
00:31:36money. That's what you find. I mean, it just kind of boils down to people my age are most envious of
00:31:41other people my age who have more money than they do. And they really notice. And I didn't know that,
00:31:46by the way. When I was in my 40s and 50s, you would have, or no, earlier, in my 20s and 30s,
00:31:50you would have blown my mind if you had shown me like a billionaire who's envious of somebody who
00:31:57has $2 billion. But it's absolutely true. And you see it all the time. I've worked because of my
00:32:03work in business schools and I've raised money for nonprofit organizations for years and years and
00:32:08years. And I've dealt with a lot of very wealthy people and they all know. And at one point, a very
00:32:15close friend who sold a house for a lot of money and it made a lot of news because it was like a lot,
00:32:19a lot, a lot, a lot of money. And somebody else was asking me, it was a mutual friend who was
00:32:24also a really, really wealthy, really wealthy. So much more than me that it's just outside of the
00:32:30realm of, you know, something I can understand. So I can look at it as an observer and not as a
00:32:34participant. And he was talking to me about my friend's house. Did you hear about so-and-so's
00:32:39house? And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. He says, you got a lot of money for it. Yeah. And then he says,
00:32:43then this other friend says to me, so what's he flying these days? What's he flying these days? He wanted to
00:32:47know what kind of private jet he had. It's just like, man, this is Dante's Il Purgatorio right
00:32:54there. It's like, all I can say is like, wire his eyes shut and put them on a cliff. Nobody's safe from
00:33:00this, but this is what you find. And once again, it's your peer group that really, really matters.
00:33:04Nobody's safe from envy. Old people envy money. Young people, it's a lot more varied than that.
00:33:10Okay. So what do you do? What do you do? Know your envy. Again, I hope you wrote it down. And it's
00:33:17different if you're a man and if you're a woman, typically it's different if you're old and if you're
00:33:20young, typically it's different if you're rich and if you're poor. So what should you do? I'm going to
00:33:24give you four suggestions from science that actually work. And if you do these four things,
00:33:31you're going to be a less envious person and you're going to be happier. Okay. You're not going to lose
00:33:36your hustle. I promise you, you're not going to lose your ambition. I'm not going to turn you into
00:33:39a slacker. There's no chance. By the way, anybody who's listening consistently to office hours can't be
00:33:45a slacker. Strivers are always going to strive. Okay. But these four things will make you fundamentally
00:33:52happier and they'll make you easier to live with and they'll make you less likely to be engaging in
00:33:58behavior that you don't admire about yourself. Number one, focus not just on the parts of people's lives
00:34:07that you wish you had, but focus on the ordinary parts of their lives as well. One of the most
00:34:13interesting things for me about my work, because I work with a lot of people who have done really
00:34:17well. I mean, they're really, really unbelievably successful people, is that they have ordinary
00:34:22lives as well that you'd never know of. I mean, you'd never know it. And part of the reason is
00:34:27because people who have intensely public lives, they have private lives that they keep separate from it.
00:34:30But you know what? Their private lives are just like yours. Their public lives are different than yours,
00:34:35but their private lives are pretty much not different than yours. They're worried about stuff.
00:34:40They're worried about their kids. They think my kid is going off the rails or doesn't love me or is
00:34:45going no contact. Happen all the time. My marriage is all screwed up. I'm actually, even though I've got
00:34:52a lot of money, I'm worried about money because of my spending, whatever happens to be. They have
00:34:56these quotidian normal worries. And it's really important to keep that in mind. There's a pretty
00:35:01interesting study from 2017 that researchers asked a group of participants to think about
00:35:08people that were sort of similar to them demographically, but who had exceptionally good
00:35:14circumstances in their lives. So where publicly, they were better off. And then asked them to think
00:35:21about their private lives and the private problems that they actually had. They were instructed to think
00:35:27about the everyday ups and downs of these people that they surely experienced, right? Because when
00:35:33I just said that to you, you know, I say, think of the most famous movie actor, you know, and say,
00:35:37do you think that they have an easier time parenting than you? Do you think that they have an easier
00:35:42time being married than you? They probably have a harder time being married than you, right? You know,
00:35:46it's true. So when you think about those things in this study, this was not a study about celebrities.
00:35:52It was just like somebody kind of like you, but who's way richer than you, for example. They found
00:35:57that envy just pretty much disappeared, at least temporarily. Envy was greatly diminished because what
00:36:04you did, they did was they humanized that other person with respect to their weaknesses. That's what we
00:36:09do. Focus on the ordinary parts of other people's lives. Now it's hard to do when you're looking at,
00:36:16at public people's lives on social media, because nobody puts the, the, the painful private up on
00:36:21social media, Hollywood stars, you know, they don't put up on their social, on their Instagram with
00:36:27four or 5 million followers. My kid just failed math again. No, they don't put that up there. They say,
00:36:35well, I'm, you know, on the red carpet, having a great time. And you look at that and you're like,
00:36:40ah, that's the person's life. That's not the person's life. That's not occupying their bandwidth.
00:36:43I promise you that that Hollywood star is thinking about their kid who just failed math again,
00:36:48or the kid who just, you know, is in drug rehab. That's what they're thinking about. The red carpet
00:36:54is like two seconds. It's a flash in the pan. The problem is that when you're on social media,
00:37:00that's all you see. And that leads to lesson number two for having less envy, get off the envy
00:37:07machines, turn them off. Social media increases envy because it shows you the lives of people more
00:37:12fortunate than you, because it's easier than ever for them to flaunt their good fortune to the masses
00:37:18and that for you to consume. And it puts you in their virtual community so that you start socially
00:37:23comparing yourself to that person. There is no social comparison between you and that person. It's all
00:37:28artificial because the real community that you have, remember, bands of 30 to 50 troglodytes,
00:37:36that's your natural cognitive social in-group, shouldn't include millions of people that are,
00:37:44you know, hundreds or thousands of miles away. Celebrities and influencers' posts are really
00:37:50potent and an unnecessary source of envy. And what you should do is you should unfollow people you don't
00:37:57know whose posts you simply look at because they have what you want. If there's anybody who has a
00:38:02glamorous lifestyle that you kind of want and you don't know that person, you should unfollow that
00:38:06person. That's just for your mental health. Social media should be that you should use your social
00:38:11media for three things: loving, learning, and laughing. Those are the three things. Loving, that is to say,
00:38:17following and interacting with people that you know, friends, family, to learning. We're using social
00:38:24media to learn something generative, not learning about, you know, an actor's private life. That's
00:38:30that's not meritorious. That's not what I'm talking about. That's in the first category of unfollow.
00:38:35It's learning about physics, if that's your thing. Learning for me, it's learning about, I mean, I follow
00:38:39everybody in the world, practically, who's doing serious work on relationships, serious behavioral and
00:38:45scientific work on relationships. I'm working on a book right now called Falling in Love and Staying
00:38:49in Love. Stay tuned. It's coming out in about two years. So learn about something. And last is laughing.
00:38:54Have a few laughs. Now, don't spend six hours a day scrolling funny reels. But what you'll find is that
00:39:00what's delivered to you by the algorithm will reflect these things and it will start to feed you
00:39:04these generative things that you should be using on social media. Put the boundaries around it as well.
00:39:09You shouldn't be on social media for a total of more than 60 minutes a day, summed across all
00:39:14platforms. That's not very much. And so if that's the case, you should take specific times in your day
00:39:20and say, I'm going to look at Instagram. Look at Instagram for 15 minutes. And then you'll look at
00:39:24your feed, which is about people you love, things you learn, and stuff you laugh at, which is what you
00:39:29actually get for dessert. Interesting article I'm going to put in the show notes here. What to do
00:39:36when social media inspires envy. An article I'll put in the show notes if you can see the science on
00:39:41how it actually does the stuff I'm talking about. Third, one of the greatest engines of envy in
00:39:47people's life, believe it or not, is trying to be envied. I mean, it kind of makes sense, doesn't it?
00:39:53You know, you always, it's a, you know, a marriage counselor one time, a friend of mine who did that
00:39:58work for a living, he told me that when a couple comes in and sits down and the husband says, I'm
00:40:03just sure that she's having an affair. That's when he knows the husband's having an affair.
00:40:09Because you, you worry the most and you fret the most about the thing that you're guilty of,
00:40:14typically. And so trying to be envied by others by being an influencer, for example, and only posting
00:40:20your strengths and your glamour, that's the best way to become a more envious person because it
00:40:26focuses you on kind of a false portrait of yourself so that you'll be looking at those attributes in
00:40:32others. If you're, if you're, if you're, their storefront is all of that glamour about yourself and
00:40:38all the success that you actually have, then you will socially compare yourself on those dimensions with
00:40:43other people and you're never going to come out on top. Never, never, never, never. Somebody's
00:40:46going to be better than you. I'm sorry. The millions of people on social media, those people
00:40:51are going to be coming up on your feed and you're going to be like, so trying to be envied is really
00:40:56problematic. And, and the way to get around that is by showing your unenviable self. There's an
00:41:03interesting article by my colleague at the Harvard Business School, Alison Wood Brooks, with a bunch of
00:41:08her co-authors. She has a 2019 study on entrepreneurs in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that were,
00:41:16when participants in her study were honest, not just about what they did right, but what they,
00:41:20how they failed along the way, observers experienced less malicious envy toward them.
00:41:25So this is really important. Show your unenviable self. People will be less malicious and schadenfreude
00:41:30oriented toward you and you'll feel less envy. But be careful when you're talking about, I'm talking
00:41:36basically being honest about your weaknesses, you know, being open and honest about your foibles.
00:41:41But be careful about this because this can very easily in egotistical people become a source of what's
00:41:47called humble bragging. Humble bragging is when you're pretending to be humble, but you're actually
00:41:52bragging. Like you put on social media, going to see the president today, but I forgot to get my suit
00:41:58pressed. Idiot. You know, that's a humble brag. And, and people hate it. There's really, really interesting
00:42:04research. I'll put one article in the, in the show notes today about humble bragging that people can
00:42:12see right through it. And you might think that you're fooling anybody about humble bragging.
00:42:16It's just like a, a billboard up on the I-95. I'm an egomaniac, right? Admire me, love me,
00:42:23adore me. It's so bad. It's even worse than just straight up bragging. As a matter of fact,
00:42:28with respect to how people like you, they won't, they'll notice it and they won't like it.
00:42:31So really show your unenviable self, like who you are. The more you do that, the less envy you'll
00:42:36feel. Here's the last one. No, no, not the second, last one, penultimate one. Turn envy into its
00:42:44cousin virtue. See, there's, there's, there's, there's capital sins. There's deadly sins, but
00:42:50there's heavenly virtues as well. And the, the parallel virtue to each sin is really worth thinking
00:42:55about. So, so pride, the, the parallel virtue is humility, of course. What's the parallel virtue
00:43:01from envy? Here's what it is. Admiration, right? See, the, the, the, the longing for something,
00:43:07benign envy in particular can be converted emotionally into admiration pretty easily.
00:43:14You can do this. And I've tried to do this a lot in my life. Send a note to somebody for whom you
00:43:19have kind of a benign envy, who's a note of admiration to that person. Don't kiss up, don't
00:43:25kiss up, but just genuine admiration. I started doing this early out of my career without knowing the
00:43:30research on this at all. The people who are doing so incredibly interesting work in the science of,
00:43:36of, you know, human behavior. And I would read these articles that would just be filled with awe.
00:43:41And still, you know, there's the, you know, people who, who are in my business, who do podcasting,
00:43:45who are just so good at it. You know, I still send un, you know, unbidden notes to podcasters who,
00:43:51they're so clear, their ideas are so good with language. Their, their shows are so interesting.
00:43:56Their conversations are so fluent. I say, just, I really admire that. And what I notice is that
00:44:01that extinguishes my envy. The heavenly virtue extinguishes the deadly sin. It really does. It
00:44:05really works. I promise you. And it makes you a better person. Plus it makes friends. It's a form
00:44:11of emotional substitution. Practice admiration when you feel envy and you will be better. Last but not least
00:44:19is gratitude. You have a lot to be grateful for. We all have a lot to be grateful for.
00:44:24We're safe. We're comfortable. We're warm. I hope you are. And focusing on what you're most grateful
00:44:29for will change your point of view. It's almost literally impossible to be envious of others when
00:44:34you're grateful for what you have and making your gratitude lists. I've talked about this in the past.
00:44:38I've done whole shows on gratitude, of, of using gratitude as a tool of life betterment,
00:44:45also extinguish, extinguishes this, this deceiver, that's thief of joy, that is envy and social
00:44:53comparison. So make your gratitude lists and, and watch your life change. I hope this has been helpful.
00:44:59I'll make sure that these, all of these things are listed and, and, and all of this will be in the
00:45:02show notes. I promise. And before we quit, let's do a few audience questions. Christina writes in to
00:45:08office hours at ArthurWorks.com. How does, how does, how do positive and negative affect interact with
00:45:13the four classic temperaments? This is a nice, this is a nice question. The four classic temperaments
00:45:17were the temperaments that the Greeks said classified different people. They are sanguine,
00:45:22choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. So sanguine people are kind of sunny individuals. Choleric
00:45:28people are people who are volatile up and down, intensely negative. Sometimes melancholic people
00:45:34are, you know, depressive and phlegmatic people are, are, are kind of low emotional amplitude,
00:45:40you know, things flow over them. And they, they, these things map right into the PANIS framework.
00:45:46Those of you who have taken the happiness scale, if you hadn't, haven't done it, go to ArthurWorks.com
00:45:50and take the happiness scale. So you can learn what your affect profile is because it'll help you
00:45:54self-manage in all sorts of ways. These are, it's, it's almost an exact mapping into it. Sanguine
00:46:01people are the cheerleaders who have high positive and low negative affect. Choleric people are the
00:46:06mad scientists, me. Mad scientists are high positive and high negative affect, intense emotionality.
00:46:14Melancholics are the poets. They have low positive and high negative affect, intense negative affect.
00:46:19And then the phlegmatics are the judges who are sort of low affect people, low positive,
00:46:24low amplitude, negative as well. So that's a good question, Christina. There's nothing new under the
00:46:28sun. As always, the philosophy maps up onto the new neuroscience and new behavioral science.
00:46:34Tony Walsh writes in to the website, "When you began your PhD studies, did you already have a specific
00:46:41research question in mind or did your research focus evolve as you progressed through the program?"
00:46:45Uh-huh. That's a really good question. And maybe Tony, you're working on your PhD,
00:46:49in which case it depends on how much time you have is what it comes down to.
00:46:53I didn't know how much time I was going to have in my PhD. And so when I started my PhD,
00:46:57I was 31 years old. I started at Cornell. I did a lot of my, my math and, and economic theory at
00:47:04Cornell. Then I transferred to the RAND graduate school, which is the PhD program in, in quantitative
00:47:09public policy analysis at the RAND Corporation, a big think tank in California, where I, I, my fields
00:47:15were applied microeconomics and mathematical modeling. And during that time, I was doing
00:47:20military operations research for the U.S. Air Force, which was part of my work alongside of
00:47:24that. And I, I intended to, to let my interests and, and, and expertise and let the muse guide me
00:47:31into what I was going to write my PhD dissertation on. And I didn't have time because Esther got pregnant
00:47:37and, uh, which is great. Right. But you know, pregnant wife focuses the mind. And so I hit the gas,
00:47:46man. And I did what I thought I could write a dissertation most quickly on that would leverage
00:47:50the information that I had. So I wrote about what I really knew. And my background was in,
00:47:55it was in the performing arts. I had come out of the performing arts out of, you know, out of
00:47:58symphony orchestras, as a matter of fact, as a French horn player, to become a behavioral scientist,
00:48:02to do my bachelor's, master's and PhD. And, and so I knew that industry super well. So I applied
00:48:09mathematical models that I had been developing for the U.S. Air Force to cultivating audiences for
00:48:14symphony orchestras. I kid you not. Do I recommend that you go back and read my doctoral dissertation?
00:48:19Do so at your peril is all I can say. So yeah, ideally your research focus evolves as you progress
00:48:27through the program. In my case, pregnancy greatly focused the imagination. My son was born as I was
00:48:35defending my dissertation. As a matter of fact, my son, Joaquin, who is now 28 and the father of two.
00:48:41Anonymous writes in as the last question for today. Curious how you think about romantic love from a
00:48:47neuroscience lens? Is it closer to addiction or a long-term source of happiness? Addiction or healthy
00:48:53happiness? The answer is yes. That's a lot of my next book. But if you read my last book, The Meaning
00:48:58of Your Life, there's a whole chapter on actually how to find the meaning of your life through romantic
00:49:03love. It walks through the neurochemical cascade of effects in the brain that very early on closely
00:49:10resembles how people behave and how they feel when they're addicted to drugs and alcohol.
00:49:14But then it progresses into something that's a lot more mystical, but also just a lot deeper with respect to
00:49:22your sanity. It goes from passionate, obsessive love into what's called companionate love. And that's part of the
00:49:28process. What you really want is to really become addicted to the other person so you can imprint on the other
00:49:34person for a pair bond, ideally a lifelong pair bond. That's how it's supposed to work. And the
00:49:40craziness of early passion has this neurochemical signature that I'll talk about maybe in future
00:49:45episodes. I have in the past a little bit, but go look at the book, The Meaning of Your Life.
00:49:49And that signature on it makes it look like complete insanity. If it stayed there forever,
00:49:53you would be completely nuts. Your life would be miserable. But progresses neurochemically into the
00:49:58the set of circumstances in which you have companionate love, which you have best friendship,
00:50:01which also it doesn't sound hot, I know, but it has plenty of passion involved in it. And that's
00:50:05a beautiful thing as well. So the answer is both. Anonymous, and thank you for the question. Well,
00:50:11we're done today. Let me know your thoughts by writing it to officehours@arthurbrooks.com or leaving
00:50:15comments any place where you're watching or listening to this. I would love what you've got to say.
00:50:19Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple. Leave a comment. As I said, I promise we read it.
00:50:25Follow me on Instagram where there's all kinds of snippets and ideas and miniature essays. Also on
00:50:31LinkedIn, on X, on all the other platforms. Order The Meaning of Your Life, I just talked about it,
00:50:36or any of the other books. And make sure to subscribe to the newsletter. Most importantly,
00:50:40like and subscribe so that next week episode comes to you and you don't have to look for it. Have a great week.
00:50:55For more information, visit www.fema.org
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