Envy: The Only Sin That Never Feels Good

I was listening to Chris Williamson interview Andrew Huberman on Modern Wisdom and something Huberman said has been sitting with me for a while. When people face uncomfortable feelings, most turn them into self-destruction or the destruction of others. People who do well in life transmute (his words, not mine) those same feelings into self-support and creation. Same feelings, divergent paths.

Huberman mentioned Paul Conti's view that envyis what kills personal development. Not anxiety or fear. Envy.

That tracks with what I see online. Someone's life looks better than yours on Instagram and suddenly you're either tearing yourself down or posting something designed to make them feel worse about theirs. You see someone's project launch and instead of starting your own, you either convince yourself you're not good enough or you start picking holes in what they've built. Both responses come from the same uncomfortable place. Neither helps you.

I've done both versions. I've seen a blog design I liked and spent hours rebuilding my site instead of writing. Blog envy as I called it at the time. Wasted energy on comparison when I should've been making things. I've caught myself being unnecessarily critical of things other people have made, finding flaws that don't matter. That's just me feeling uncomfortable about my own stuff and directing it outward.

The interesting bit is recognising it's the same feeling powering both reactions. Discomfort. Inadequacy. That nagging sense that you're not where you should be. You can let that feeling make you small and bitter, or you can use it as fuel. Most people default to the first option because it's easier. Tearing down is always easier than building up.

Social media makes this worse. The platforms are designed to surface the exact content that'll make you feel inadequate. They show you things that trigger comparison because that keeps you scrolling. Your feeds are full of people's highlight reels while you're living your entire unedited life. Of course you feel uncomfortable. Of course envy creeps in. The question is what you do with it.

I think about this when I catch myself worrying about feedback or letting my ego get involved. That's just discomfort wearing a different mask. The urge to check stats or compare myself to other writers or fiddle with my blog design instead of publishing. All of it comes from the same place. None of it helps.

What helps is recognising the feeling for what it is and deciding to do something productive with it. Write the post. Build the thing. Start the project. Take the uncomfortable feeling and turn it into forward motion instead of letting it loop back on itself.

I'm not suggesting this is easy. It's not. The default response to inadequacy is to make yourself feel better by either hiding or by making someone else feel worse. But those are dead ends. They don't actually resolve the uncomfortable feeling. They just temporarily mask it.

This transmuting of uncomfortable feelings isn't some mystical process. It's just choosing a different response to the same trigger. Feeling envious of someone's work? Make your own. Feeling uncomfortable with where you're at? Start moving. Feeling inadequate? Do the work that'll make you adequate. It's that simple and that hard.

Envy only wins if you let it keep you static. If you let it convince you that someone else having something good means you can't have something good. If you let it turn you inward in a destructive way or outward toward others in a destructive way. The uncomfortable feeling will always be there. It's part of being human and wanting to grow. What matters is what you build from it.