"do you think people who hate Osama Bin Laden are just jealous of him?"

Guess what, if you delete social media you’ll stop envying people’s fake lives and envy people’s real lives instead. You don’t even get the cope of justifying to yourself that they’re just doing it for the gram. And you’ll probably feel even worse knowing people have amazing lives and aren’t even documenting them. Because you would document it, wouldn’t you? You’d want everyone to know that you were having fun without them <3 because you WANT people to look at you and feel like terrible about themselves, don’t you? :) Surely, you can’t be naive enough to believe someone is actually rooting for your success?

I was thinking about this angle again after reading Mikala Jamison’s extremely reasonable response to people feeling terrible about themselves after Nara Smith showed her flat postpartum stomach on Instagram.

“They don’t care to influence an army of women into replication; that would devalue their position as the prettiest perfect princess with the most perfect prettiest princess life, wouldn’t it? They only care to influence an army of eyeballs onto their pages. We know this.

The influencer is thinking only of her own self presentation, and the response it’ll cause, because that is quite literally the most valuable thing in her life. She is not posing that image of her flat postpartum stomach as a directive. She is posting it as an advertisement for her brand. If you’re not buying what she’s selling, save the valuable currency that is your own energy.”

I believe it, that these many are not in the business of making you feel bad about yourself. You feeling bad about yourself is merely an externality.

The thing about that whole disordered eating posting culture is that I’m pretty sure these people were both trying to boost their own self-image AND trying to make me feel bad! A scene can’t be “exclusive” unless you are making people feel excluded. Of course they were still victims of their own illness and a culture that glorified it, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t get off on making other people feel disgusting in comparison.

back when tinned fish was “hot girl food”

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August 15, 2024

In 2021 I kept getting triggered. It wasn’t Equinox/green juice/cottage cheese keto meals. Those were obvious orthorexic flexes. This also wasn’t the supermodel slurping spaghetti and eating a Carl’s Jr burger with grease dripping down her hands type of flex, either. This aesthetic seemed more insidious and quietly pro-ana, almost to the extent where I …

So much of our world is driven by envy, from commerce to motherhood to exercise regimes. There are businesses called “Massage Envy” and “Nail Envy.” “Massage Envy” is particularly confusing, because it’s really ambiguous as to whom would be doing the envying? Are you, the bystander, supposed to peek into the window and envy the people getting massaged?

When you witness something in someone else’s life, your response is:

and/or

and/or

That is envy. Unlike stealing or cheating or lying, it never feels good, nor does it bring you any sort of award or get you out of trouble. It’s just bad.

I know people say envy can actually be good because it reveals what you want and you can use it to motivate yourself. I will never defend envy. It’s inevitable and natural and normal, but it should not be considered useful. If it’s unavoidable, the shorter-lived it is, the better. It corrodes the spirit, and any attempt to wield its evil as a tool for your own empowerment will end in self-destruction. Let’s say I envy someone’s career and it inspires me to work harder, come up with a plan, and I actually get there. What am I going to do the next time I feel dissatisfied? I’ll compare myself unfavorably to someone again and use the same tactic, reinforcing the idea that I have to hate myself to feel good again and never escape that cycle.

I also find it difficult to stomach the idea that someone may be envious of me, anyone at all. I find envy to be a shameful experience, and I would never want anyone to feel the same way. I imagine the experience of someone else’s envy upon you could make you remember how much of your privilege is undeserved. And it wouldn’t make you feel grateful. It would make you want to force-feed gratitude down the envier’s throat to relieve you of your privilege-guilt. But that brings me to my next question, an open question:

People love to act like envy is the only reason that someone could dislike an individual. Sometimes these people treat the envy of others as an indicator of their own success, like only a great person could be worthy of somebody’s ill will.

steph :) wrote a good piece about the phenomenon of women assuming everyone is out to get them and plotting their downfall just because they are pretty.

I don’t have a lot of good coping mechanisms against envy. There’s prayer, sure. There’s also acknowledging that what I am experiencing is envy, and to continue this thought is not “living in my values.” There’s looking away from the trigger. Counting my own blessings isn’t a very helpful one for me personally. There’s distraction, too. Such as baking or hard labor.

• someone who is worse than you

• someone who is better than you

• someone who is the same as you

• someone who is different from you

In the spirit of self-help books, I’ve tried naming these archetypes:

• the talentless hack: This is a person you deem unworthy of success, and specifically less worthy than yourself. Whether by luck or shameless self-promotion, they have achieved something greater than you have, and it triggers a bit of rage every time you see them rise higher and higher, especially if they are going unpunished for bad deeds. Sometimes, envy of the talentless hack indicates that you want acknowledgement for the thankless work you have been doing.

• the exceptional: This is a person who is simply Built Different and does things excellently. Ballerina Farm’s Hannah is a good example of this. She achieved the pinnacle of success for most dancers as a Juilliard graduate, is a mother to children who seem cute and healthy, she effortlessly carries a boiling hot cast iron dutch oven with 22 servings of stew, she is a pageant winner even when heavily pregnant, she seems mentally well and stable, and she is a canny and successful influencer and businessperson. She just achieves and seems to do a lot more in her day and life than most of us. And we can never be her!

• the double: This is like the Lila/Lenu one. You are more similar to this person than you are to most other people. Maybe you even grew up together. This person is very similar to you, but just seemed to get lucky. Or maybe there was one critical parameter (such as confidence or connections or will to power) where they were better off than you and able to exceed you. This is also the Natalie Beach-Caroline Calloway story. Natalie envied Caroline’s extroversion while Caroline envied Natalie’s work ethic. And in the end, they’re two white girls from NYU who wanted to be famous writers. I’d consider this form of envy the most dangerous one, and the one most likely to lead you to resent your own life and self. And since friends tend to be people who are similar to each other, this is the kind of sentiment that ruins relationships. You can either conquer this early on, or let it chip away at mutual goodwill that once existed, until you don’t even know if you can root for each other anymore.

• the foreigner: This is a person whose values and personality are so alien to you that you couldn’t even get into their headspace to replicate their model. You wouldn’t even know how to reverse engineer their success because they are so different from you. This is what “Sympathy is a Knife” is about, BTW. This is the other scenario I’ve thought of. There is a loud girl and a quiet girl (like Rory Gilmore). The loud girl who is loud needs to get attention and perform their personality and they are tap dancing as hard as they can to get validation. And then they see a Rory Gilmore type, who seems to them the epitome of “I don’t chase I attract,” getting no less than 4 hunky CW suitors. She is quiet, but not ignored. People listen to her, somehow. And it makes you think that perhaps you have been living life all wrong, in a way you couldn’t even begin to fix.

Will thinking in terms of these archetypes rid you of envy? I would guess not, to be honest. But am I interested in hearing more about this topic from you? I certainly am. Let’s all be a little better together. Talking openly about envy is very different from actively experiencing it.