`I`m envying women I don`t even know. I`m envying women I don`t even like.”
It`s Heidi Holland in ”The Heidi Chronicles,” alter ego of playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who often articulates the point of view of her midlife Baby Boom peers. Addressing her fellow private-school alumnae at a ”Women-Where Are We Going?” luncheon, Heidi goes on to elaborate upon her epiphany about envy at an aerobics class:
”I don`t blame the ladies in the locker room for how I feel. I don`t blame any of us. We`re all concerned, intelligent, good women. It`s just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn`t feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were all in this together.”
Being in it together may have been the point in the 1960s, when times were lush and the country`s leaders renewed the founding promise of abundance, liberty and opportunity for all. But the end to this fantastic American dream, the promise of having it all and doing it all, is in sight, and the new reality is that we`re not all going to get our heart`s desires.
What`s speeding the end of the dream is an unprecedented convergence of demographics and economic conditions. The Baby Boom is moving into midlife, a phase when limits begin to surface. Since affirmative-action programs mushroomed in the early 1970s, roughly twice as many people are vying to get on the fast track. More recently, fierce competition in the workplace and a shakeup climate that has destroyed job security have left corporate siblings battling for a reduced number of positions, promotions and perks. Also, the economy has slid into a slowdown likely to continue into the next decade. That, combined with massive foreign debt and a burgeoning elderly population, threatens to reduce real after-tax wages, economists warn, and perpetuate a stagnant economy.
For a young generation of high rollers, the stock market crash of 1987 may have been the first taste of a bitter downturn. As we enter the fin de siecle decade, the middle class will feel the squeeze, too. As the lid comes down, relationships, financial goals and career aspirations will all be affected:
– Not everyone who expected to own a home or reach other financial aims will realize these goals.
– Not everyone who expected to attend undergraduate, graduate or professional school will be able to afford it.
– Not everyone who expected to reach career objectives set in earlier, less competitive times, will succeed.
– Not everyone who expected to marry will find a mate.
– Not everyone who expected to be a parent but deferred child-bearing will be able to have a family.
– Not everyone who simply expected companionship will find someone to be with.
As disappointment grows, and as ambitions and desires are thwarted, social conditions are ripe for a destructive epidemic of envy, the all-too-human emotion defined by Webster`s as the ”painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another joined with a desire to possess the same advantage.”
Easy doesn`t do it
Envy is not a gentle emotion. It`s not ”I want what you have, too.”
It`s aggressive: ”I want what you have, and I want you not to have it. I want to take it away from you, and if I can`t do that, I`ll spoil or destroy it.” Envy is unlike jealousy, which is based on love and focuses on possessing the loved object and removing the rival. Envy originates in hate and can be all-consuming, even murderous in intensity. Envious people live in a perpetual state of anxious, competitive comparison, focusing on what others around them have, and what they themselves lack.
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Particularly susceptible to its dangers is Wendy Wasserstein`s generation-a population segment reared on high expectations and not trained to cope with limitations. So are her younger siblings, the generation who came into adulthood in the Reagan era, with its glossy veneer of entitlement. If the Depression attitude was, ”You can`t have everything,” and the postwar expansionist period created a shared credo, ”You can have everything,” the 1980s taught us, ”You should have everything.” And that shift, coupled with current curbs on potential, has opened the floodgates to envy.
Social scientist Daniel Yankelovich agrees that the newly lowered expectations preceded by a period of heightened expectations-and the Reagan message that those expectations are a moral right-have created the possibility of envy. But gaping differences in wealth don`t automatically trigger the emotion, he says. ”A lot of people who lived through the 1930s have a sense of nostalgia about the feeling of community developed then. People helped each other. But the moral, ethical and cultural climate of today is bleak enough that envy could be a result,” Yankelovich says.
The greed breed
”The country`s obsession with money and greed breeds envy. I see it constantly,” says Harriet Braiker, a Los Angeles-based author, clinical psychologist and management consultant. Examples she has seen: husbands and wives who envy each other`s career successes, companies that pit people against one another to increase productivity-even childless women who envy other women`s children the way they might envy a Mercedes.
According to Ann Ulanov, professor of psychiatry and religion at Union Theological Seminary and co-author, with Barnard College English professor Barry Ulanov, of ”Cinderella & Her Sisters: the Envied and the Envying”
(Westminster Press, 1983), ”Those of us who as adults do not find a way to be true to who or what we are, what gives us our own identity, are also vulnerable. The self we refuse to life avenges itself, turns on us and makes us miserable. Then we envy people who are really living themselves.”
Think of the enduring fairy tale about Cinderella. She is the envy of her cruel stepmother and ugly stepsisters-and their terrible malice toward her has, whatever her ultimate fate, sentenced her to servitude and suffering. Indeed, to be the object of envy can be as painful as feeling envious of someone else.
”Envy always makes you into a thing,” says Ann Ulanov. ”If you`re the envied one, you`re either seen as an idealized perfect object or as the root of all the other person`s suffering. You`re not seen as yourself. You`re just looked at for the part of you that the other person wants to steal or take.” A true threat
From the perspective of the envied one, to be envied is to be threatened, attacked. ”One feels under threat of being robbed,” writes Barry Ulanov,
”not only of specific advantages one may possess but in some uncanny way of one`s very substance.”
Defending against envy can be futile. If the envied person responds by withdrawing, he is renounced as cold and aloof. Or if he tries to appease his tormentors, he is not listened to. Just as Cinderella`s sisters scorn her attempts to reach them, an envied person ”learns that any effort to be nice will only intensify the break,” according to the Ulanovs. ”The envied person has run into a wall with no opening and no way around it.”
There`s another dead end envied people encounter: By triggering envy in others, they risk finding themselves isolated from their community. As Garrison Keillor reminds us, there is a traditional taboo against outdoing the neighbors and becoming a target for envy. It`s almost as if a Greek chorus can be heard in small towns and subgroups: ”Who do you think you are? You`re not so smart. . . . You`re from Lake Wobegon. You shouldn`t think you`re somebody. You`re no better than the rest of us.”
A turning point
When Heidi Holland realizes she is envying women she doesn`t even know or like, it is a turning point. ”I`m sure the (27-year-old) hotshots have screwed a lot of 35-year-old women-my classmates, even-out of jobs, raises and husbands,” she says. ”And I`m sure the mothers in the pressed blue jeans think women like me have chosen the wrong road. (I can hear them: `A pity they made such a big mistake, that empty generation.`) Well, I really don`t want to be feeling this way about all of them.”
But she doesn`t feel that way for long. She allows this painful envy to enter her awareness, and then uses it as a catalyst to make the changes in her life that will ease her suffering. One of the changes Heidi Holland chooses to ease the loneliness of a life given over largely to work is to adopt a child. Bringing envy to the surface can be a positive step. What is reassuring, points out Ann Ulanov, is that where envy is, there is goodness. And the envier can find it. Envy can initiate growth.
Think of envy as hunger for the good, she advises; turn and face the emptiness. ”The things we envy in others symbolize the underlying food of being, the knowledge that we are alive and connected with others,” she says. ”Admit to yourself, `I`m hungry.` Experience that pain, and look for the good within. Ask, `Where is the goodness? Let me discover it as best I can.`
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Finding your own answers
If, for instance, a woman unable to have a child finds herself envying women who are mothers, she can use her envy as a hopeful sign. ”Find out what bearing a child means to you,” Ann Ulanov says, ”and ask yourself, what does this suffering mean? Then try to find something else-your own solution.” This may mean adopting a child, the Heidi Holland path, or finding a way to express a yearning to nurture in a larger context-in your community or your profession, for instance.
Volunteering may also provide a hopeful antidote to the envy epidemic. Finding what will make your life truly satisfying and meaningful, Ann Ulanov adds, takes so much energy you won`t have time to lean over the fence and envy your neighbors.
Although painful, once owned up to, envy can be transformed from a detour into a spur to action. Envy may be a sign that it`s time to acknowledge that today`s unfulfilled areas were the result of choices made in years past. It may be a symbol of a path not taken, a new path to explore or an alternative to put to rest so energy can be channeled productively. It may mean it`s time to accept material limits, or growing older and losing physical advantages once taken for granted. It may lead to a change of values, a shift to a less materialistic, more spiritual or fulfilling view of life. Such explorations can resolve the painful dilemma of envy-and offer new challenges and opportunities for growth.