Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - 5 Ways to Kill Your Envy and Get Happier

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's episode is about a really unfortunate part of life, one that sucks the joy out of day-to-day existence on an all-to-regular basis. And that's envy, the happiness killer. You know, I talk to people all the time who they wanted to have kids, for example, and they couldn't have kids, and they see people with kids. And it's just they're filled with this bitterness as a result of that. Or they had a dream of other careers and their dream just never came true. And they see people who don't deserve the success and who have it are just consumed by that envy. And it's a really terrible thing. Why?

Starting point is 00:00:30 Why do we have it? What's the basis of it? But more importantly, for the envies in your life, terrible or not so terrible, intense or mild, what can you do to actually manage that envy and maybe even turn it into something beneficial? That's what we're talking about today. Hey, friends, welcome to office hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is our show about love and happiness.

Starting point is 00:00:57 And the science that can actually bring those ideas and those concepts more to your life and more of the lives of other people. I am a happiness teacher. I teach at Vanderbilt University. For the last seven years, I was at Harvard University, bringing it to some of the greatest students in the world. But more importantly, I'm trying to bring these ideas to a much wider audience,

Starting point is 00:01:15 which is why I do this show. Fundamentally, I want you to have more love and happiness in your life. But almost as importantly, I want you to become a happiness teacher and bring it to other people for two reasons. Number one is that builds a better world. That gives us leverage. That's why I'm using this incredible platform

Starting point is 00:01:31 of modern media to do it. But also because one of the things that I know is that in the world of self-improvement, insights are no match for habits. And habits only come when we share ideas with others. It's really interesting, is that if you want to do something consistently in your life, you've got to teach other people about it. If you want to go to the gym, you've got to make it a habit.

Starting point is 00:01:52 And the best way to make it a habit is by teaching other people how to work out. And so that's really what I'm talking about in my work. I want you to join me in the movement of, happy happiness professors. So thank you for joining me. Thank you for sticking with me. Please do like and subscribe. One of the things that we learn about this show is that most of the people who are watching and listening to us actually are not subscribing to the show itself. It comes across the algorithm or they kind of look for it once a week or whatever it happens

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Starting point is 00:03:34 All right. Today's episode is about a really unfortunate part of life that is a very natural part of life, but one that sucks the joy out of day-to-day existence on an all-to-regular basis. And that's envy, the happiness killer. I want to talk about that today because I've thought about it in an awful lot in no small part because I, like every other person in the world, have experienced it. I saw a poll a few years ago. I can't remember actually who sponsored.

Starting point is 00:04:07 It was an industry poll put out by some company, probably pretty reputable. I don't know why it wouldn't be, but it was along the following lines. What's the first thing that you notice when you meet somebody of your same gender and age? What's the first thing that you notice? And the answers were all over the map. But here's the first thing that bald men notice when they look at men their own age who aren't bald hair, the first thing they notice. And the first feeling that they have when they see a guy, a bald man sees, when he sees somebody his own age who's got a full head of hair is that? Right. It's a little tiny bit of resentment.

Starting point is 00:04:49 It's envy. And a lot of us are like, I don't care. We care. Right. I mean, not that much. You shouldn't animate your whole existence, and I don't recommend going to absurd lengths to it. Unless it's a joke, by the way. I mean, my dad was a cue ball just like me. And my dad had a great sense of self-effacing humor. He had a toupee that he would wear sometimes. I remember at one point, he was getting ready for, he was a lecturer like me and he was a university professor. It was like me.

Starting point is 00:05:14 I was a teenager. He's getting ready to go, you know, teach a class. And he just look at it himself in the mirror while he's fixing his tie. And he looks at himself and he says, you know, I think that tie needs hair. and he opened up his closet, he took out his toupee and put it on and lectured. And I could just imagine the horrified and amused students that he was teaching where Professor Brooks shows up with hair.

Starting point is 00:05:36 So good. If you're willing to be so self-effacing to have a good sense of humor about it, that's fantastic. But there is envy and something even as dumb as that. More seriously, you know, sometimes I feel envied because I meet people all the time who are smarter, more skillful than me in the intellectual pursuits that I really value, something that I think are really, really good. It's tinged by admiration,

Starting point is 00:05:59 of course, and I'm going to talk about the relationship between admiration and envy as we move on in this episode. But I'm not immune from that. None of us is immune from that. And that's one of the weird parts of life because it doesn't make us happy. On the contrary, why is this misery-provoking thing happening to people all the time? And my little envies are nothing compared to the envies. many people feel. You know, I talk to people all the time who they wanted to have kids, for example, they couldn't have kids, and they see people with kids, and it's just they're filled with as bitterness as a result of that. And it animates them, or they had a dream of other careers and their dream just never came true. And they see people who don't deserve the success and

Starting point is 00:06:42 have it are just consumed by that envy. And it's a really terrible thing. Why? Why do we have it? What's the basis of it? But more importantly, for the envies in your life, terrible, or or not so terrible, intense or mild. What can you do to actually manage that envy and maybe even turn it into something beneficial? That's what we're talking about today. Now, there's nothing new about the concept of envy as the happiness killer.

Starting point is 00:07:11 Most of you, if you haven't read it, you know an awful lot about Dante's Divine Comedy. This is this great medieval Italian work. It's one of the three most read books in Italian. is Dante's divine comedy. If you want to know what the other two are, you know what the other two are? Machiavelli's the Prince and Pinocchio.

Starting point is 00:07:33 So now you know, the three most popular books in Italian. A little side, you know, just in case anybody watches office hours is going to be contested on Jeopardy, you can send me half the proceeds. But in Dante's Divine Comedy, the 13th Canto of Purgatorio,

Starting point is 00:07:50 the Divine Comedy is three books, the Inferno, which you're most familiar with, Purgatorio, and then there's Paraiso. So it's hell, Purgatory, in heaven. At the 13th, though, the second book in Purgatory, the Italian poet, Dante, he describes the punishments of different people for different kinds of sins. Now, you probably know that envy in classical Christianity is considered to be as classified as one of the seven deadly sins. There's seven deadly sins.

Starting point is 00:08:22 It's the second worst. The worst is pride. Now, pride is the sin of the devil, right? And in Dante's Divine Comedy, the devil is consumed by pride, and that's represented as, you know, the bottom of the pit of hell isn't filled with fire. And the bottom of the pit of hell, Satan is down there. And he's, you know, he's got flapping his awful wings, but he's frozen up to his waist in a block of ice in the divine comedy. And that ice is, it represents his being frozen in place by his own pride, by his own intense interest in himself, which makes it impossible for him to free himself. To be free is to be liberated, to be happy and he can't because this pride is like a block of ice.

Starting point is 00:09:08 And he's in agony, so he's flapping his wings fruitlessly. And all he's doing is freezing the air and making the block of ice more solid. And he's so consumed by his pride that he doesn't even notice that Dante, the author, is going down there with actually his guide is Virgil, the Roman poet. And they go down and Virgil has explained to him that this is pride and this is the devil. The devil doesn't even see him. So the devil doesn't hurt him at all because pride distracts you. Anyway, I digress. The second worst, which comes from pride is envy.

Starting point is 00:09:43 Your pride about yourself makes you envious of other people who. have things that you don't, whether they're, they're ill gotten or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, earned when you're prideful about yourself, you'll be envious of other people. That's what the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, in Mount Purgatory, he finds all the envious people, the most envious people. And, you know, what he does in this is he, you know, he names famous people throughout history who had this, but it's, it's, it's supposed to represent you, if this is your defining sin, that they're all, it's a, that these are people who are in a dark, dark, dark cave. They're all clustered on the side of a sheer cliff.

Starting point is 00:10:27 And to avoid falling into the pit below them, they have to hold each other up, which envious people never did in ordinary life. They never helped each other in ordinary life. But they have to, they have to hold each other up and be held up, which is agony, if you were consumed by envy. and their eyes are wired shut. Their eyes are wired shut because, you know, envy started with what they saw around them, so they can't see anything. It's really descriptive. It's sort of awful in its way.

Starting point is 00:10:59 Now, that's a pretty grim punishment, to be sure. But, you know, the punishment in real life is plenty bad. You know, I'll give you some statistics in a minute about the correlation between envy and depression, envy and anxiety. It takes the life out of life. And so you don't worry about hell later. It's hell now is what it comes down to. And that's one of the reasons, by the way, that probably, that envy is in the Ten Commandments.

Starting point is 00:11:24 It's a sin that gets two commandments. You know, you're not supposed to be lusting after your neighbor's wife and you're not supposed to be trying to get your neighbor's stuff. I mean, stick to your own knitting, man. Don't envy your neighbor is what it comes down to. But two, not just one, because it's considered to be so bad, so bad for society, so bad for the world, so bad for So bad for you. Okay. Now, let's define it because, you know, let's define our terms here before we can actually get somewhere near a solution to the problem of envy.

Starting point is 00:11:56 Envy is defined by social scientists as the resentful longing for what someone else possesses. Okay. Not just the longing for what somebody else possesses, but the resentful longing. In other words, the negative emotion around that gives you a little bit of health. or purgatory right now is the envy. It's sort of sours relationships because it makes you like people less because of the success that they have. It brings out spite. It brings out real ugliness in people. And it actually gives you pleasure in the suffering of others, which has this great German word, Schadenfreude, which means joy in the suffering of others. Joy in the suffering of others

Starting point is 00:12:36 is always based in envy because it has to do with a resentful, a resentful longing is what we actually see when people's good fortune makes ours feel insufficient by comparison. There's a great essayist by the name of Joseph Epstein, many of you know his work. Shows up in the Wall Street Journal a lot, but he was a, you know, a professor at University of Chicago for a long time. And he said, he wrote a book on envy, a little book by that's, I'll put it in the show notes, called envy in Oxford University of Press. And here's this great quote, of the seven deadly sins, It's only envy is no fun at all. Lust, you know, greed, gluttony, kind of fun is this point.

Starting point is 00:13:18 Envy, not even fun. It hurts you. It hurts the world. It's bad. It's sinful. In other words, it's just the worst because it's based not just on longing but on resentment as well. Now, why does it exist? Why would this actually exist?

Starting point is 00:13:34 Most of these weird things that we do has an evolutionary. biological basis to it. This is the modus operandi of all of my analysis always is, okay, where did it come from and why is it still around? Why was it not eliminated over hundreds and thousands of generations of human development? You know, why didn't sexual selection get rid of it? Why weren't envious people bred out of, bred out of society? And there's some reason that it kind it persists. And ordinarily, you have to look for a reason that it came into being for the first place. You've got to find the benefit of it, you know, whatever it happens to be. There's no benefit to baldness, by the way. So what is it about envy that would have been naturally evolved? And the

Starting point is 00:14:19 answer is this. Envy is based on social comparison. Social comparison, me versus you, how am I doing compared to how well you are doing, is really natural because that's how we gauge our relative place in society. It shows us where we stand. Now, it's all relative in this way. You know, if you're living in a country where the average income per year is $6,000 a year, you're going to look at yourself with respect to $6,000, more than $6,000, less than $6,000, more or less. But if you live in the United States, it's going to be really different, which is one of the reasons that generation after generation, unambiguously people have been getting richer, but we always find some reason to be really, really resentful. Right now, for example, real estate is ruinously expensive and

Starting point is 00:15:01 most major metropolitan areas. And so that's what people fixate on, despite the fact that virtually all technology and health care and transportation and all these things are cheaper and easier and better and jobs pay more. And we have more per capita consumption in almost every way. People are always like, yeah, I know life's worse because, you know, sucks. The houses are so expensive. Why? Because that's what we do is we gauge our own prosperity and success with respect to the benchmark around us, and that's highly contextual and social. It's all based on how well other people. How well am I doing? I don't know. How well are you doing? And I'll be able to say. We do that because going back to approximately 250,000 years ago, when all human beings lived in ban, virtually all

Starting point is 00:15:46 humans lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals who are kin-based and hierarchical, we needed to know what it meant to stay competitive. We needed to know what it meant to be a successful person, to have the resources that would make us viable to not starve and to protect ourselves and get mates. This is the three things we want it fundamentally, is to don't starve, right? Survive the night, don't get eaten by animals or killed by another tribe, and find mates.

Starting point is 00:16:13 You know, these are this biological imperatives that go back and are super, super hardwired into us, and we're going to have more success doing that if we have higher prestige, higher resources, if we're just simply doing better. To know that, we have to go. comparisons to other people the basis of social comparison. That's part one. Part two is not just knowing that information, but an inborn desire to act on that information, to get better.

Starting point is 00:16:40 You're going to be more successful. You'll have an impetus to be more successful. If you want more, more what? More mates, more food, more security. And how do I know how much is enough? I'm comparing myself to you. Now, if you have more than me, it means I need to have an incentive to want to get ahead and to get more. That social comparison is invidious in that case. It makes me want to climb and that's envy. This is the reason that the emotion of envy is actually evolved and sticks with us. It enhances our reproductive and security fitness. That's what it comes down to. Don't want it to be the case, but we are made to build ourselves up and or to tear other people down.

Starting point is 00:17:26 Now, building yourself up is a lot better than tearing other people down, but remember, when you're in a social hierarchy, either will actually do. And there's lots of jokes that come from that. My wonderful dad, now of a very blessed memory, he died in 2002. He used to say, you know, son, it's not enough to win. Your friends have to lose, too. And that wasn't my dad's attitude. My dad was not an overly envious person.

Starting point is 00:17:52 But, you know, that was a remark on the human condition. And not bad for a man with a PhD in biostat and was a math professor. He was a really a great behavioral scientist, I have to say. Now, all of this stuff of building ourselves up or tearing ourselves down were life or death and troglodyte times. They serve us to a certain extent now, but they can also be anachronistic and maladapted in modern times. You're unlikely to, you know, walk the frozen tundra and die alone because your social media posts are less popular than others, because you have fewer Instagram followers than your friends. but we still have his impulse impulse impulse because it's hardwired into us that's where it comes from okay now what are we done defined envy number one is is is i hope i made the case that people are envious we've defined

Starting point is 00:18:38 envy number two we've talked about why it exists now let's actually talk about the different kinds of envy there's two kinds of envy benign and malicious okay you can of course this is how it makes perfect sense, that some of it would be really, really bad and some less so. And it's, uh, we, we have a lot of studies on this. There's a really good study I'll put in the show notes on this paper in a motion review called envy and adversarial review in comparison of two competing views. And so this is a really, really nice overview. It's from 2020. So it's not that ancient a paper as well that talks about the differences between benign and malicious envy. Benign envy, it can be miserable, but it can also lead you to better things. Benign envy occurs when you believe that admiration for another

Starting point is 00:19:23 person is deserved. So if you look at a war hero, you're just really envious of that person's courage and virtues. And by the way, you're also envious of the admiration that other people give them. You're envious of the social prestige that they've gotten from their meritorious behavior. That's benign envy. And benign is benign. I mean, it might not make you super happy, but it's fundamentally benign with respect to the social destructiveness that that can actually bring. There's a really interesting paper on benign envy. I'll also put in the show notes from Frontiers and Psychology, which is really an apex journal in psychology called the role of subjective and objective social status and the generation of envy.

Starting point is 00:20:03 So a lot of it is really benign, and it can serve a productive purpose in your life because it can give you a desire for self-improvement, it can give you a desire to emulate the envied person. And I remember this all at different points in my life. You know, most of the envy that I have of people who have more skill in me, that gives me an impulse, even at my, you know, I'm not a kid anymore to keep learning, keep learning, keep learning, read more, study more, get better at what I do, get better at podcasting, get better at giving speeches on stage, all the things that I do. And that's one of the reasons that I don't lean into the sense of envy, but I do pay attention to the work of the people that I actually envy. I want to get better. I want to cultivate my desire for self-improvement. I want to emulate that particular person more on how to turn benign envy into something good in a second

Starting point is 00:20:54 when I get to the prescriptions part of this podcast. When I was a musician back in the old days all the way through my 20s, I was a professional French horn player. I had pictures of some of the greatest horn players of the world on my wall, and I envied them. I envied their success. I wanted their success. But it was a benign envy that gave me the impulse to do better,

Starting point is 00:21:12 as a matter of fact. Now that's in contrast to malicious envy about which there's nothing good to say that leads to wholly destructive actions, hostile thoughts, behavior intended to harm other people. malicious envy is based on on envy of people that you don't believe actually earned what they have they have what you want but they didn't earn it in your view now you might be wrong but that's really really common as well like you know look I can't believe she's getting all those roles in those movies and I'm just as good as an actress as she is and I'm just as beautiful as she is and wouldn't it be great if she you know if her if her wonderful husband had an affair left her that's where schadenfreude comes in

Starting point is 00:21:54 Malicious envy is this resentment in the longing. It's more resentment even than longing, as a matter of fact. And it makes you want bad things to happen, hostile thoughts. And you'll enjoy it when harm actually comes to the other person. When people get ahead unjustly, then you have a sense of malicious envy. We see a lot of us in politics today, as a matter of fact, because there's so much political polarization. And when the other side actually wins elections, a lot of that incredible hostility, you know, I want to do anything I can to see if I can find some sort of a scandal.

Starting point is 00:22:26 Wouldn't it be wonderful of my political enemies went to jail? A lot of that is motivated by malicious envy, as a matter of fact, not just this was bad for America. That's a smokescreen a lot of the time. I mean, maybe true, you decide, but malicious envy is way more powerful than your benevolence toward your beloved country. On the contrary, it will motivate you and focus you in a way that those positive cognitions and emotions never will, as a matter of fact. So you as a fellow observer of human behavior, be on the lookout for malicious envy and the conversations that you have with politics, about politics.

Starting point is 00:23:01 And see it yourself and curb it in ways I'll talk about here in a second, but also recognize it in the way that people are talking about political actors on social media. You'll also recognize it a lot when people just love it when the mighty fall. I mean, we have a natural tendency to kind of want to suck up to celebrities. and people who are just actors, you don't really think that they're so great. But if you're around them and they want to be friends with you, like, oh, that's awesome. You know, so-and-so.

Starting point is 00:23:30 A famous actor wants to be friends with me, and you probably would want that. But if you never knew that person, and they're just an actor and something bad happens to them, you might enjoy it. That's a complicated thing, right? I would love it if they were my friend,

Starting point is 00:23:43 but I enjoy it if they fall. What's that all about? And what that's all about is the longing on one side and the resentment on the other. other. And that's the essence of the malicious envy. You have that in you, which is why you have that kind of conflict that's actually going on for you as well. You're enjoying some handsome Hollywood actors' ninth divorce. That's malicious envy. It's terrible for you. It's really terrible for you. There's it. Malicious envy is just awful for you as a person. Super interesting

Starting point is 00:24:12 paper from science, once again, one of the greatest journals out there called When Your Gain is My Pain and your pain is my gain, neural correlates of envy and schadenfreude is on the nose, man. And what it looks at is the effects of the brain when you're feeling envy. What happens is that envying other people stimulates their brain's anterior cingulate cortex. Again, if you follow my work closely, you know that I talk a lot about the dorsal anterior cingling cortex, which is one of the affective pain centers of the brain. When you're feeling aggrieved and sad and rejected and you're feeling mental pain, that's the anterior singular cortex of your brain is highly active in those moments.

Starting point is 00:24:51 You have an on-board pain center so that you will be averse to negative experiences so that you'll try not to do the things that actually bring you to sadness because generally speaking, they're not good to you. Envy lights up those pain centers of your brain. In other words, pain hurts. Also, there's research on how it affects your future. There are scholars writing in social science and medicine. Very nice journal.

Starting point is 00:25:15 They looked at 18,000, a big sample, randomly selected individuals, and found that their experience of envy predicted in the future worse mental health, more depression and more anxiety, and just lower overall happiness. In other words, envy now has a cost later. And this is one of the reasons that it's so important that we be teaching our kids appropriately, proper techniques for emotional self-management, and we manage the way that they use social media. social media is an envy machine. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a second, but it's also really, really bad for the mental health of kids going into their adulthood. If your kids are just super envious

Starting point is 00:25:54 because of their use of social media and glamorous people and successful people and the influencers who have tons of stupid stuff, like, I don't know, followers on social media, who cares? Your kids do. And they indulge that envy, you know, unalloyed because of their unrestricted access to social media and screens.

Starting point is 00:26:13 and also because you don't talk to them about how important it is that they get away from that. They will have worse mental health in the future, according to this research, and they'll be unhappier people as adults. You're training your brain to feel more pain. Train the brain to feel more pain. Sorry, I'm not trying to do poetry here, but you get the point that I'm trying to make. Okay. So ordinarily, people get psychologically healthier as they get older.

Starting point is 00:26:38 I've talked about that a lot of the show. Your personality gets better. You get more agreeable, more conscientious. you get more assertive in positive ways. You tend to be more open to experience, at least until your mid-50s. You tend to get less neurotic as you get older. You tend to be less anxious and less depressed. Many people are pretty much healed from lifelong depression

Starting point is 00:27:00 just through the passage of time because as people get older, they get better unless they're envious. Envy is one of the best ways for you not to get mentally healthier as you get older. and that's why it's so critically important that all of my young friends who are watching this today that you learn how to manage your envy, that you learn how to manage this part of your life.

Starting point is 00:27:20 Envy that runs out of control will ruin the happiness benefit that should be your future. That's the stakes that we talk about. Right now, you're like Neo in the Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life, or you can wake up

Starting point is 00:27:37 to how your attention is being harvested for profit. It's happening to people. all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore, but it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system, just like heroin, porn, gambling, you've got the cravings, you're addicted. You don't like it, and I don't either. But I can't just tell you to stop doing it, that's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. Well, here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce break,

Starting point is 00:28:11 Rhein rot, get Noble Mobile Mobile. It pays you to use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you. Use less data, earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life. And you're going to like how it feels. Now, before we, you know, get into the solutions to this, I want to talk about what people envy, because I think this is really interesting and useful. Different people envy different things. You know, I envy cognitive horsepower and hair, I guess. I envy other things as well, and I'm making too much out of the hair apart, but you get my point. There's been a lot of people that, people envy, but then I don't. For example, I mean, I can see people with a fancy boat or a car all day long

Starting point is 00:28:58 or golf clubs, and I don't care. I could not care less. I'd save me from owning a boat. I mean, it's just like I could not care less. But there are general patterns that are actually what we see it. And the reason I tell you. you this is I want you to catalog your envy. Before we get into the solutions, I want you to understand it. So I want you, before you do the homework, I'm going to give you in a minute. I want you to think, okay, what do I envy? I want you to write it down. I want you to write down in order the three or four things that you envy the most. Know thyself. If you know you're honestly know your faults, you're going to be in a position of power to deal with them. So young people

Starting point is 00:29:34 are more generally speaking, well, envious of older people. Okay. So, you know, young adults, rather than older adults, at the following four things. Educational success, okay? People who are my age are generally not very envious of younger people or anybody who has more degrees. Social success, you envy that less as you get older. So you get that to look forward to. Good looks. I mean, it matters, but it matters less when you get older.

Starting point is 00:30:03 And romantic fortune. You know, one of the things that you find is when people in the 60s, it's, it is what it is. So you might envy those things, but young people are their most generally consumed by resource and reproductive cues. If somebody else has more resource cues to attract mates and to attract resources, then you, you don't like it. And when somebody has more reproductive fitness cues, they're more attractive. They're more likely to be attractive to the other members of the species. They don't like that either. Obviously, men and women envy different qualities.

Starting point is 00:30:38 you find that men are most likely to envy social status and prestige. Why? Because as David Buss, the University of Texas at Austin has written clearly, men are most attractive to women, especially young men to young women, when they exhibit a lot of resource cues. I can drag in gazelles, one after the other. That's what makes them really, really attractive.

Starting point is 00:31:01 So social status and prestige are a way to show that. And so they're really most envious of other young men in particular, but men in general of men who have higher social status and higher prestige. Women, on the other hand, are more resentful of, have more resentful longing with respect to women who are more physically attractive. That's what you find. Now, that's just a pattern that has to do with the fact that the reproductive cues are different. This is biological evolution as well.

Starting point is 00:31:30 Older people are more envious of each other just with the amount of money. It's what you find. I mean, it just kind of boils down to you. People my age are most envious of other people my age who have more money than they do. And they really notice. And I didn't know that, by the way. When I was in my 40s and 50s, you would have, no, earlier. In my 20s and 30s, you would have blown my mind if you had shown me like a billionaire who's envious of somebody who has $2 billion.

Starting point is 00:31:58 But it's absolutely true. And you see it all the time. You know, I've worked, you know, because of my, you know, work in business schools and I've raised money. for nonprofit organizations for years and years and years and years. And I've dealt with a lot of very wealthy people. And they all know, you know. And at one point, you know, a very close friend who sold a house for a lot of money and it made a lot of news because it was like a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of money.

Starting point is 00:32:20 And somebody else was asking me, it was a mutual friend who's also really, really wealthy, really wealthy. So much more than me that it's just outside of the realm of, you know, something I can understand. So I can look at it as an observer and out as a participant. But, and he was talking to me about my friend's house. He said, you hear about so-and-so's house? And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. He says, he got a lot of money for it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:42 And then he says, then this other friend says to me, so what's he flying these days? What's he flying these days? He wanted to know what kind of private jet he had. Like, man, this is Dante's Ilburgatorio right there. It's like, all I can say is like, wire his eyes shut and put him on a cliff. Nobody's safe from this, but this is what you find.

Starting point is 00:33:02 And once again, it's your peer group that really, really matters. Nobody's safe from envy. Old people envy money. Young people, it's a lot more varied than that. Okay. So what do you do? What do you do? Know you're envied. Again, I hope you wrote it down. And it's different if you're a man and if you're a woman typically is different if you're old and if you're young typically as different if you're rich and if you're poor. So what should you do? I'm going to give you four suggestions from science that actually work. And if you do these four things, you're going to be a less envious person and you're going to be happier. Okay, you're not going to lose your hustle. I promise you, you're not going to lose your ambition. I'm not going to turn you into a slacker. There's no chance. By the way, anybody who's listening consistently to office hours can't be a slacker. Strivers are always going to strive.

Starting point is 00:33:49 Okay. But these four things will make you fundamentally happier and they'll make you easier to live with. And they'll make you less likely to be engaging in behavior that you don't admire about yourself. Number one. focus not just on the parts of people's lives that you wish you had, but focus on the ordinary parts of their lives as well. One of the most interesting things for me about my work, because I work with a lot of people who have done really well. I mean, they're really, really unbelievably successful people, is that they have ordinary lives as well that you'd never know of. I mean, you'd never know it.

Starting point is 00:34:26 And part of the reason is because people who have intensely public lives, they have private lives that they keep separate from it. But you know what? Their private lives are just like yours. Their public lives are different than yours, but their private lives are pretty much not different than yours. They're worried about stuff. They're worried about their kids. They think my kid is going off the rails or doesn't love me or is going no contact. Have it all the time. My marriage is all screwed up. I'm actually, even though I've got a lot of money, I'm worried about money because of my spending, whatever happens to be. They have these quotidian normal worries. And it's really important to keep that in mind. There's a pretty interesting study from 2017 that researchers asked a group of participants to think about people that were sort of similar to them demographically, but who had exceptionally good circumstances in their lives. So where publicly they were better off

Starting point is 00:35:18 and then asked them to think about their private lives and the private problems that they actually had. They were instructed to think about the everyday ups and downs of these people that they surely experienced, right? Because when I just said that to you, you know, I say, think of the most famous movie actor you know and say, do you think that they have an easier time parenting than you?

Starting point is 00:35:41 Do you think that they have an easier time being married than you? They probably have a harder time being married than you, right? You know it's true. So when you think about those things in this study, this was not a study about celebrities. It was just like somebody kind of like you, but who's way richer than you, for example. They found that envy just pretty,

Starting point is 00:35:59 much disappeared, at least temporarily. Envy was greatly diminished because what you did, they did was they humanized that other person with respect to their weaknesses. That's what we do. Focus on the ordinary parts of other people's lives. Now, it's hard to do when you're looking at public people's lives on social media because nobody puts the painful private up on social media. Hollywood stars, you know, they don't put up on their social on their Instagram with four,

Starting point is 00:36:27 or five million followers. My kid just failed math again. Brutal. No, they don't put that up there. They say, well, on the red carpet, having a great time. And you look at that and you're like, ah, that's the person's life. That's not the person's life. That's not occupying their bandwidth. I promise you that Hollywood star is thinking about their kid who just failed math again

Starting point is 00:36:48 or the kid who just, you know, is in drug rehab. That's what they're thinking about. The red carpet is like two seconds. It's a flash in the pan. The problem is that when you're on social media, that's all you see. And that leads to lesson number two for having less envy. Get off the envy machines. Turn them off.

Starting point is 00:37:09 Social media increases envy because it shows you the lives of people more fortunate than you because it's easier than ever for them to flaunt their good fortune to the masses and that for you to consume. And it puts you in their virtual community so that you start socially comparing yourself to that person. There is no social comparison between you and that person. And it's all artificial because the real community that you have, remember, bands of 30 to 50 troglodytes, that's your natural cognitive social in-group, shouldn't include millions of people that are, you know, hundreds or thousands of miles away. Celebrities and influencers posts are really potent and an unnecessary source of envy. And what you should do is you should unfollow people you don't know whose posts you simply look at because they have what you want.

Starting point is 00:38:01 If there's anybody who has a glamorous lifestyle that you kind of want, and you don't know that person, you shouldn't unfollow that person. That's just for your mental health. Social media should be that you should use your social media for three things, loving, learning, and laughing. Those are the three things. Loving, that is to say, following and interacting with people that you know, friends, family, two, learning.

Starting point is 00:38:23 where you're using social media to learn something generative, not learning about, you know, an actor's private life. That's not meritorious. That's not what I'm talking about. That's in the first category of unfollow. It's learning about physics, if that's your thing. Learning for me, it's learning about, I mean, I follow everybody in the world practically who's doing serious work on relationships,

Starting point is 00:38:44 serious behavioral and scientific work in relationships. I'm working on a book right now called Falling in Love and Stay tuned. It's coming out in about two years. So learn about something. and last is laughing, have a few laughs. Now, don't spend six hours a day scrolling funny reels. But what you'll find is that what's delivered to you by the algorithm will reflect these things and it will start to feed you these generative things that you should be using on social media. Put the boundaries around it as well. You shouldn't be on social media for a total of more than

Starting point is 00:39:12 60 minutes a day summed across all platforms. That's not very much. And so if that's the case, you should take specific times in your day and say, I'm going to look at Instagram. and look at Instagram for 15 minutes, and then you'll look at your feed, which is about people you love, things you learn, and stuff you laugh at, which is what you actually get for dessert.

Starting point is 00:39:33 Interesting article I'm going to put in the show notes here. What to do when social media inspires envy, an article I'll put in the show notes. If you can see the science on how it actually does the stuff I'm talking about. Third, third, one of the greatest engines of envy in people's life, believe it or not,

Starting point is 00:39:50 is trying to be envied. I mean, it kind of makes sense, doesn't it? You know, you always, it's a, you know, a marriage counselor one time, a friend of mine who did that work for a living, he told me that when a couple comes in and sits down and the husband says, I'm just sure that she's having an affair. That's when he knows the husband's having an affair. Because you worry the most and you fret the most about the thing that you're guilty of, typically. And so trying to be envied by others, by being an influencer, for example, and only posting your strength. and your glamour, that's the best way to become a more envious person because it focuses you on kind of a false portrait of yourself so that you'll be looking at those attributes in others.

Starting point is 00:40:33 If your storefront is all of that glamour about yourself and all the success that you actually have, then you will socially compare yourself on those dimensions with other people, and you're never going to come out on top, never, never, never, never, never. Somebody's going to be better than you. I'm sorry. The millions of people on social media, those people, people are going to be coming up on your feed and you're going to be like, so trying to be envied is really problematic. And the way to get around that is by showing your unenviable self. There's

Starting point is 00:41:03 an interesting article by my colleague at the Harvard Business School, Alison Woodbrooks, with a bunch of her co-authors. She has a 2019 study on entrepreneurs in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that were when participants in her study were honest, not just about what they did right, but how they failed along the way, observers experienced less malicious envy toward them. So this is really important. Show your unenviable self. People will be less malicious and schadenfreude oriented toward you. And you'll feel less envy.

Starting point is 00:41:33 But be careful when you're talking about, I'm talking basically being honest about your weaknesses, you know, being open and honest about your foibles. But be careful about this because this can very easily and egotistical people become a source of what's called humble bragging. Humble bragging is when you're pretending to be humble, but you're actually bragging like you put on social media, going to see the president today, but I forgot to get my suit pressed. Idiot. You know, that's a humble brag. And people hate it.

Starting point is 00:42:03 There's really, really interesting research. I'll put one article in the show notes today about humble bragging that people can see right through it. And you might think that you're fooling anybody about humble bragging. It's just like a billboard up on the I-95. I'm an egomaniac, right? Admire me, love me, adore me. It's so bad. It's even worse than just straight up bragging, as a matter of fact, with respect to how

Starting point is 00:42:29 people like you. They'll notice it and they won't like it. So really show your unenviable self, like who you are. The more you do that, less envy you'll feel. Here's the last one. No, no, not the second last one, penultimate one. Turn envy into its cousin virtue. See, there's capital sins, there's deadly sins, but there's heavenly virtues as well.

Starting point is 00:42:52 And the parallel virtue to each sin is really worth thinking about. So pride, the parallel virtue is humility, of course. What's the parallel virtue from envy? Here's what it is, admiration. See, the longing for something. Benign envy in particular can be converted emotionally into admiration pretty easily. you can do this. And I've tried to do this a lot in my life. Send a note to somebody for whom you have kind of a benign envy who's a note of admiration to that person. Don't kiss up. Don't kiss up,

Starting point is 00:43:25 but just genuine admiration. I started doing this early out of my career without knowing the research on this at all, the people who are doing so incredibly interesting work in the science of human behavior. And I would read these articles that would just be filled with awe. And still, you know, there's the, you know, people who are in my business who do podcasting, who are just so good at it. You know, I still send unbidden notes to podcasters who, they're so clear, their ideas, they're so good with language. Their shows are so interesting. Their conversations are so fluid. I say, just, I really admire that. And what I notice is that that extinguishes my envy, the heavenly virtue extinguishes the deadly sin. It really does. It really works. I promise you. And it makes you a better

Starting point is 00:44:08 person. Plus, it makes friends. It's a form of emotional substitution. Practice admiration when you feel envy and you will be better. Last but not least is gratitude. You have a lot to be grateful for. We all have a lot to be grateful for. We're safe, we're comfortable, we're warm. I hope you are. And focusing on what you're most grateful for will change your point of view. It's almost literally impossible to be envious of others when you're grateful for what you have and making your gratitude lists. I've talked about this in the past. I've done whole shows on gratitude of using gratitude as a tool of life betterment also extinguishes this deceiver, this thief of joy that is envy and social comparison. So make your gratitude lists and watch your life change. I hope this has been helpful. I'll make

Starting point is 00:44:59 sure that all of these things are listed and all of this will be in the show notes, I promise. And before we quit, let's do a few audience questions. Christina writes in, to officers that Arthur Brooks.com, how does how do positive and negative affect interact with a four classic temperaments? This is a nice, this is a nice question. The four classic temperaments were the temperaments that the Greek said

Starting point is 00:45:19 classified different people. They are sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. So sanguine people are kind of sunny individuals. Caleric people are people who are volatile up and down, intensely negative sometimes. Melancholic people are, you know, depressive

Starting point is 00:45:35 and phlegmatic people are are kind of low emotional amplitude, you know, things flow over them. And these things map right into the PANIS framework. Those of you who have taken the happiness scale, if you haven't done it, go to Arthurbrooks.com and take the happiness scale so you can learn what your affect profile is because it'll help yourself manage in all sorts of ways. These are, it's almost an exact mapping into it. Senguine people are the cheerleaders who have high, positive, and low negative affect.

Starting point is 00:46:05 caloric people to mad scientists, me. Mad scientists are high positive and high negative affect, intense emotionality. Melancholics are the poets. They have low positive and high negative affect, intense negative affect. And the phlegmatics are the judges who are sort of low affect people, low positive, low amplitude negative as well. So that's a good question, Christina. There's nothing new under the sun.

Starting point is 00:46:29 As always, the philosophy maps up onto the new neuroscience and new behavioral science. Tony Walsh writes in to the website. When you began your PhD studies, did you already have a specific research question in mind? Or did your research focus evolve as you progressed through the program? That's a really good question. And maybe Tony, you're working on your PhD, in which case, it depends on how much time you have is what it comes down to. I didn't know how much time I was going to have in my PhD. And so when I started my PhD, I was 31 years old.

Starting point is 00:46:59 I started at Cornell. I did a lot of my math and economic theory at course. Cornell, then I transferred to the Rand Graduate School, which is the PhD program in quantitative public policy analysis at the Rand Corporation, a big thing tank in California, where my fields were applied microeconomics and mathematical modeling. And during that time, I was doing military operations research for the U.S. Air Force, which was part of my work alongside of that. And I intended to let my interests and expertise and let the muse guide me into what I was going to write my PhD dissertation on.

Starting point is 00:47:34 And I didn't have time because Esther got pregnant, which is great, right? But, you know, pregnant wife focuses the mind. And so I hid the gas, man. And I did what I thought I could write an insertation most quickly on that would leverage the information that I had. So I wrote about what I really knew. And my background was in the performing arts. I had come out of the performing arts out of symphony orchestras, as a matter of fact,

Starting point is 00:48:00 as a French horn player, to become a behavioral scientist to do my bachelor's master's and PhD. And so I knew that industry super well. So I applied mathematical models that I had been developing for the U.S. Air Force to cultivating audiences for symphony orchestras. I kid you not. Do I recommend that you go back and read my doctoral assertation? Do so at your peril is all I can say. So yeah, ideally your research focus evolves as you progress through the program. In my case, pregnancy greatly focused the imagination. My son was bored. as I was defending my dissertation, as a matter of fact, my son Joaquin, who is now 28 and the father of two. Anonymous writes that is the last question for today.

Starting point is 00:48:44 Curious how you think about romantic love from a neuroscience lens. Is it closer to addiction or a long-term source of happiness? Addiction or healthy happiness? The answer is yes. That's a lot of my next book. But if you read my last book, The Meaning of Your Life, there's a whole chapter on actually how to find the meaning of your life through romantic love. It walks through the neurochemical cascade of effects in the brain that very early on closely

Starting point is 00:49:10 resemble how people behave and how they feel when they're addicted to drugs and alcohol. But then it progresses into something that's a lot more mystical, but also just a lot deeper with respect to your sanity. It goes from passionate, obsessive love into what's called companionate love. And that's part of the process. What you really want is to really become addicted to the other person. so you can imprint on the other person for a pair bond, ideally a lifelong pair bond. That's how it's supposed to work.

Starting point is 00:49:40 And the craziness of early passion has this neurochemical signature that I'll talk about maybe in future episodes. I have in the past a little bit, but go look at the book, The Meaning of Your Life. And that signature on it makes it look like complete insanity. If it stayed there forever, you would be completely nuts. Your life would be miserable. But progresses neurochemically into the set of circumstances in which you have companionate at love, which you have best friendship, which also, it doesn't sound

Starting point is 00:50:02 hot, I know. But it has plenty of passion involved in it, and that's a beautiful thing as well. So the answer is both anonymous, and thank you for the question. Well, we're done today. Let me know your thoughts by writing it to office hours at arthurbricks.com or leaving comments any place where you're watching or listening to this. We'd love what you've got to say. Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple. Leave a comment. As I said, I promise we read it. Follow me in Instagram where there's all kinds of snippets and ideas and miniature essays. Also on LinkedIn, on X on all the other platforms or to the meaning of your life. I just talked about it or any of the other books and make sure to subscribe to the newsletter. Most importantly, like and subscribe so

Starting point is 00:50:41 that next week episode comes to you and you don't have to look for it. Have a great week.

Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - 5 Ways to Kill Your Envy and Get Happier

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