Envy

Hey All,

Last night I had a long and complex set of dreams in which at some point someone said to me, “Nature sat us all down next to each other and gave us envy.”

I happened to wake up soon after, and while the sentence itself didn’t make direct sense to me I immediately understood what it was getting at. I’ve long felt that all of our emotions are natural, and by themselves serve purposes in the right circumstances. That’s not to say that everyone’s anger is always appropriate. It’s just to say that sometimes anger is appropriate. Emotions lead to problems when they are misapplied or felt not in the right circumstances.

Meanwhile I’ve always felt that envy is a particularly ugly emotion. I know that sort of contradicts what I said above about the emotions themselves are natural. But i also don’t think it contradicts, as I’ll say below. I know some people who are really motivated by envy, and I think envy causes a lot of social problems. And for the most part I don’t really have the envy gene, by which I don’t feel it as much as some people.

Parenthetical note: a lot of writers have been much motivated by envy. I know, for example, that Hemingway was envious of other writers’ success, and called their work “masterpisses.” I also remember the joke I’ve heard about actors: “How many actors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” “Ten. One to get up on the ladder and nine to say, ‘That should be me up there.’”

All that said, although I’m not primarily motivated by envy, I do feel it sometimes.

Anyway, the thing I realized immediately after waking up from the dream, is that I think envy is a sort of second-level emotion, or meta-emotion, and that the primary natural emotion that can turn over into envy is that we all have a sense of fairness. I think a sense of fairness is inherent to living beings. We see it all the time in dogs: if no dogs get a treat, everyone is fine. If one dog gets a treat, the other dogs perceive this unfairness. I’ve seen it with bears, too. I’m sure if I knew other animals as well I would see it there too. I think that sense of fairness is the real emotion.

And then this sense of having been treated unfairly can become the foundation for envy. That’s the essence of that lightbulb joke: it’s unfair that person A is up there when it should be me: I’m every bit as good as person A.

Or maybe put better, a sense of fair play curdles into envy, or rots into envy. Curdles or rots isn’t right. Nor is metastasizes. Maybe solidifies, or fossilizes. Freezes?

Dunno. I just had the dream last night. Maybe the proper language will come to me and I can put it in some book or another.

This is the sort of stuff I used to handwrite into bunches of notebooks when I was a young writer. Now I get to share it with you, and keep it in a searchable form, so when it comes time to put it in a book I don’t have to look through a dozen notebooks with terrible handwriting I can’t decipher, but can type in the word “envy” and do a search.

Not that this is a blanket endorsement, or any endorsement at all, of the technology.

Anyway, I need to sleep.

Derrick