On Envy

B

To not feel as much envy? I age 🙂

Professor

I really enjoy your blog and the thought-provoking topics you choose. Yes I have felt envy but usually it’s one aspect of someone’s life. Like immediate success where I have had to work very hard, or popularity or good looks.. or something like that. I think that intuitively I have known how to shut it down, even as a teenager I practiced it – so the feeling of envy is usually very fleeting. What I do is actively tell myself good things about why that person deserves that thing I am envious about. About things like good looks – I wish I was a goddess – I have just accepted the positives I have – like being able to eat junk and being thin even if my face wouldn’t launch a thousand boats. So I guess that since I was very young I actively did what the article tells you to do – think about what’s missing and how to fill that hole.
I don’t do social media for that reason – I knew instinctively that there would be times that I’d be doing passive hate-reading or whatever, so I don’t have facebook. In instagram I only follow travels sites and beautiful houses or feeds like AD, House & Garden etc. It’s worked for me so far.

Xin

I feel like I’ve generally been well-insulated from having envy inspired by other people’s “highlight reel” photos or other posts on Facebook, Instagram, etc. throughout my post-college life. Way back in the pre-Instagram days, I’d sometimes feel jealous or get FOMO feelings from other people’s Facebooks, but I seemed to grow completely out of it by the time I graduated college. (This sounds silly, but I think a big part of the reason was that because I was always very shy and introverted and had a very small offline social circle, I never had as many Facebook friends commenting on or “liking” my photos and posts as anyone else I knew, so I learned very quickly that I shouldn’t care, I definitely couldn’t compete with anyone else… That seemed to help free me from caring about Instagram likes or anything once I finally had an Instagram later on in life.)

I think we both grew up in a similar community (Bay Area, in a setting with competitive schools and where Asian Americans were very well-represented). Through graduating college I would sometimes feel envy about academic and professional accomplishments. But by my first or second year of law school, it became clear I was going to achieve everything I could dream of wanting academically and professionally in law school, I was on track to reach my maximum potential. Nothing I ever envied from high school or college age, to the extent I was disappointed by what I had, actually kept me from anything I wanted in the legal profession. (This does make me sound like someone with a very narrow worldview, I guess, that most of the biggest things I’ve ever been envious of in my life are all academic and early-career professional things.) One implication of the Professors Chua and Ruberfeld brouhaha at Yale is that… luck, nepotism, and being well-connected can be a huge part of competing for things like SCOTUS clerkships, but at my not-Harvard and not-Yale law school, the SCOTUS clerkship game is much more of an actual meritocracy, and the people who are in contention are mostly accomplishing that primarily through hard work and ability.

The pandemic did admittedly bring back some of my old feelings of envy that I had to think about. The pandemic really disrupted a lot of things in my life, both personally and career-wise, and I hated feeling so stuck. As a result, my brain did feel some envy about other people my age whose lives, outwardly, didn’t seem quite as stuck.