Envy: from sin to success
Image Description: A woman in sunglasses poses in front of a beautiful waterfall with a sign that says “I’m here. You not.”
Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash
Spring is in the air. Not only are the days getting longer and the air warmer, but there is a feeling of optimism as well, as vaccinations become more widely available and a life beyond the pandemic could be here possibly as soon as the summer.
There is another side to this as well. The rollout of the vaccines has been uneven to say the least. Where I live, it has gone at a snail’s pace and in a way that has been far from smooth, easy, or equitable. Aside from being frustrating, the process of accessing vaccines has brought out something unhealthy. Seeing social media images and posts of friends and colleagues in other states with post-injection band-aids on their arms, vaccination certificates, and happy faces should have brought me joy that they were safer and were helping us move towards herd immunity and a return to some sense of normalcy. Instead, I’ll admit that it sometimes brought out feelings of envy.
Envy is defined as the desire to have a quality, possession, or other attribute belonging to someone else. Whether we want to admit it or not, envy is not unfamiliar to most artists. Whether you make a living from your art through sales, commissions, grants, prizes or you simply want your art to be seen and appreciated by others, you likely make art in contexts of comparison with other artists. Our work exists in a marketplace, whether it is one of money, recognition, or impact. With any marketplace comes competition and, with any competitive environment, we perceive there to be those who get ahead and those who get left behind.
This is certainly true in the filmmaking world in which I work. Recently the documentary business consultant Peter Hamilton came out with an article The Sundance Documentary Economy: The Odds for Feature Docs. The $806M Cost of Missing Out. Among its reminders: Only 1.8% of documentary features submitted to the Sundance Film Festival actually get in. This past week also saw the announcement of the nominations for the Academy Awards which always leads to more discussion about what didn’t get nominated than what did.
Substitute any other art form for film, and then substitute other pie-in-the-sky markers of success: winning a Pulitzer, playing at Carnegie Hall, selling out a performance, having your work spur a bidding war at Sotheby’s, etc. etc. Competing to have these markers come true can be unattainable aspirations for the vast majority of artists. They also lead invariably to comparisons with other artists. Why is her art selling and mine is not? Why have I had to fight to get even half of what this less experienced artist is getting?
Envy is not something we feel that comfortable admitting out loud. This is because it usually occupies a negative framework. Most major religions consider envy as something to be avoided. Heck, it’s even one of the seven deadly sins in Catholicism. Envy can be an important plot point in literature, theatre, and song. Think of one of Shakespeare’s greatest works when Iago feeds into Othello’s jealousy ironically by warning him of it:
O beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster
which doth mock the meat it feeds on.
More recent bards Pink Floyd referenced envy in their 1969 song Green is the Color:
Green is the colour of her kind.
Quickness of the eye deceives the mind.
Envy is the bond between the
hopeful and the damned.
While it is easy to write off envy at its worst as a sin or at its best as sour grapes, that ignores what is at its heart. As the British psychiatrist and philosopher Neel Burton puts it, “The pain of envy is caused not by the desire for the advantages of others per se, but by the feelings of inferiority and frustration occasioned by their lack in ourselves” (The Psychology and Philosophy of Envy, Psychology Today, August 21, 2014). Experiencing envy has very little to do with the person who is the target of our envy. It is more about our own complex feelings about what it means to be successful in our creative pursuits.
When you recognize those feelings of envy in yourself, what you do next is telling. Instead of wallowing in this emotion (“Why is everyone winning except for me?” or letting it stop you in your tracks (“Why even bother?”), what if this emotion could instead trigger something positive?
Steps to Success
Instead of using someone else’s measuring stick for success, why not use our own? Make a distinction between “success” (with a small s) and “Success” (with a capitalized S). Small s successes could include many accomplishments that are specific and personal to us as individual artists. Capital S Success is how many of us define the ultimate goal as an artist by definitions that aren’t necessarily our own, but which we have internalized based on popular perceptions of what Success looks like. Very often, we can get so caught up in seeking Success that we ignore or minimize our own successes in the process. Find a way to record these successes in a place where you can revisit them when envy gets the best of you. It could be the notes feature of your phone, a notebook or sticky notes on a wall. I actually have made a habit of writing down “wins of the week” on a whiteboard. At the end of the week, before I erase the board to start anew, I record my top win of the week on a scrap of paper, and put it in a jar. That way, I can visually see the successes filling up the jar and can look at more than 50 successes at the end of the year. Even when the wins feel small, they still force you to reflect on your own accomplishments that move you forward.
Convert Anger into Admiration
If you find yourself feeling sad or even angry when a colleague gets some form of recognition that you either tried for or wish you could have, ask yourself what it is you admire about this person. Do they have a certain kind of work ethic? Do they have a unique approach to how they approach their work or how they present their work? What resonates with you? This is not a recommendation to try to turn envy into emulation, but simply to step back and look at what they are doing from another angle. Some of the artists I admire most I admire less for their art than for how they have approached their work and careers.
While you are at it, why not also reach out and congratulate them? You would be surprised how being generous with praise not only can make someone else feel good, but can make you feel better. It is also a time to be open to praise that may come your way from someone who admires you. Often we can be so focused on wanting something we don’t have that we not only forget what we have accomplished, but that others are noticing our accomplishments. Chances are both your admirer and your so-called rival face their own set of obstacles towards their own definition of Success.
Spur to Action
I’ve always found the best way to harness what are often seen as negative emotions is to use them to inspire positive action. You can’t control what happens to other people. You may not even be able to control how your work is perceived in the marketplace. You can, however, control your own efforts towards bettering your art and yourself as an artist. If you are disappointed by a setback, allow yourself the time and space to be disappointed. Then move on and move forward. Sometimes setbacks force us to become even more creative and driven.
A Note About Social Media
As if doomscrolling through depressing news doesn’t have enough impact on one’s psyche, you could also be prone to envy when friends in your artistic community share positive news (or, in my case, when they start flashing their vaccination certificates) all over the feed. If you got passed over for an important award that others in your community are all buzzing about, maybe take a few days off from social media. Or change the way you use it. Instead of passively scrolling through carefully curated shares from people you may only know as acquaintances, focus more on engaging with friends. Comment on posts rather than Liking/Hearting them. Share an interesting article and say how it resonates with you and what others think. Or be generous by amplifying someone else’s work or words with a share and a shout-out. For all you know, you’ll be lifting up someone else who might be need that boost just as much as you do.
Humans are social creatures and we have been conditioned through evolution to thrive with some level of competition with other humans for scarce resources and rewards. Thus, envy should be seen as a normal emotion, not something to feel shameful in admitting. As with all emotions, if taken to an extreme, envy can be debilitating. However it can also be an elixir that brings out our superpowers.
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