Often, before I fall asleep, I can't help but take one last dip.
And I never know when it will hit me, or exactly how, just that it will.
And then boom. There it is. The 'Personal News Claxon'.
Usually followed by a new job, book deal, house, car, baby, dream holiday.
Definitely something I should be happy for them about.
And I am. But I also can't help that uncomfortable feeling, that jab
in the gut I felt as if it was some sort of judgement on my own life.
It feels easier than ever to compare our lives to others,
to measure the gap between what we have and what we think we want to have.
And that gap causes us pain.
That gap is envy.
And I can't help but wonder if social media is driving us to be
more envious than we've ever been?
And, in a strange way, might that actually be good for us?
Of course, there is nothing modern about our feelings of envy.
Some of the greatest thinkers of the ancient world pondered it.
One well-known ancient approach to envy was that of Aristotle, in his Ethics.
He talks about Envy as an undesirable emotion
because of its urge to take away goodness.
The envious person wanted to pull down other people to their level
and thereby decrease the amount of goodness in the world.
That generally negative view of envy was certainly picked up by Christianity.
It became a 'deadly sin' in the early Middle Ages,
and that general characterisation of envy as an undesirable
and even wicked response continues.
The 18th Century German philosopher Immanuel Kant maintained
that all kinds of envy are destructive, claiming envy "aims,
at least in terms of one's wishes,
at destroying others good fortune".
I mean, it's little wonder really that discussing,
and even acknowledging, our own feelings of envy has become such a taboo.
I really love the people who say that they were never envious.
You know, it's because, we are so programmed to hide it
from ourselves, and our research shows that very clearly.
There seems to me to be a certain irony
in the way we blind ourselves to our own feelings of envy,
given how closely envy is often linked to sight.
Take Dante, in his Divine Comedy, who gruesomely depicts the envious in purgatory
as having their eyes "sewn shut
with iron threads".
This is seen by some as a way to prevent them seeing
and therefor envying the good fortune of others,
or as a way to protect others from the malevolence of their envious gaze.
This itself links into the ancient tradition of the evil eye:
A curse transmitted through a malicious glare, usually inspired by envy.
So perhaps the fact that social media platforms such as Facebook
and Instagram have become so image focused, is what,
in part, makes them so effective at stirring envy within us.
We are always making decisions about how to present ourselves to others.
What social media allows us to do
with filters and the ability to take multiple snapshots
is just really accelerate this process, put it on steroids, so to speak.
Yeah, one look in my phone reveals I'm definitely guilty
of this hyper-curation.
Looking back I wonder why I had to take 20 identical photos
of my daughter, searching for that ideal image when,
of course, each one was perfect in its own right.
I often only post about days out I have
where the weather is great and everything looks idyllic.
I don't post about the tantrums and arguments
30 seconds before that photo was taken.
So I often think about social media as placing these 'envy landmines'
in front of us.
We don't always know when we're going to get that hit of envy.
And I think that is what makes it so pernicious to a certain degree.
It's not just what triggers our envy that gives social media its power,
but who we envy too. For me, it's never the super-famous
that stir up that uncomfortable feeling in my gut.
A close friend's new marginally-bigger-than-my-own house
stings infinitely more than Jeff Bezos holidaying in space,
and there's a good reason for this.
A lot of envy's power comes from the fact
that someone else's out-performance reflects badly on ourselves.
And that's really only true
for people who are otherwise quite comparable to ourselves.
And who do we tend to fill our social media feeds with most?
Friends, family, colleagues.
We have essentially created giant envy echo chambers.
But my own relationship with envy is, kind of, ambivalent.
In a way I believe it has also been motivational,
at times driving me on to succeed.
Perhaps there are other, positive ways we can view this complex emotion?
I mean, other cultures don't exclusively view envy in a negative light.
For example, Russia has words for 'white' and 'black' envy,
and a lot of the recent research into different 'types' of envy
has been inspired by the Dutch words 'benijden' for benign envy
and 'afgunst' for malicious envy.
So, Malicious envy looks a lot like the traditional deadly sin,
focusing on the person and wishing they didn't have what you want,
and experiencing pleasure at any misfortune they may suffer -
in what is known as the German word 'schadenfreude'.
But benign envy focuses more on the object
of your envy and how you might achieve it for yourself.
The idea is that this type of envy can actually motivate
you to elevate and improve your own situation,
perhaps bringing it closer to Aristotle's idea of 'Emulation'.
However this distinction between 'good' and 'bad' envy
could be counter-productive.
The problem is that it confounds the emotion with the outcome of the emotion,
what the emotion leads to, which is for me,
as a scientist, a problem.
In this way, perhaps it is better to view the emotion of envy itself
as a mirror, reflecting back at us information about ourselves.
What we do with that information is down to us.
This chimes with the views of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche,
who argued that envy was an important signal for what we really want,
a fragment of our true potential, that should be forensically studied.
The minute you are able to say 'I'm envious',
you can discuss it with yourself.
OK, what am I envious of? What can I do about it?
It really is a tool for self-reflection, if a person is willing to look
at the information, it tells you what you desire.
It reveals your insecurities.
When we experience that little ping of envy, we can use that emotion
as information that might then motivate us to take action,
to reconcile that discrepancy between where we are and where we want to be.
Rather than blinding ourselves to our feelings of envy,
like Dante's envious souls in purgatory, their eyes sewn shut,
we should instead approach it with our eyes wide open
and embrace what it is telling us.
In this way, perhaps instead of creating a dangerous 'age of envy',
social media is actually providing us
with an opportunity to better understand ourselves.