"Envy"

I wrote this song once. The chorus went: "I wanna be someone else, from another place, with a different face; I wanna see myself, in another scene, from a different dream." My bass player at the time left the lyrics out one day and his mom saw them. She read them, then looked at him and asked if he was depressed. He told her that I was the one who had written the song. At the next band practice, we all had a good laugh about it.

Because, of course, you know there was no way in hell that I would admit at that time that I actually was depressed. I couldn't admit it to myself, much less anyone else. Denial. It ain't just a river in Egypt.

Envy is a big part of this American culture, though. We see people with bigger houses, fancier cars. The pretty girlfriend. The succesful husband. There used to be a saying about being happy with who we are and with what we have. I don't hear that saying anymore. Our great consumerist society is entirely dependent on people being dissatisfied with what they have. If you're happy with what you've got, why would you buy anything else? If your cars runs and you like it fine, why would you want a new one? One of my conspiracy theory friends is even firmly convinced that the whole move to HD TVs was a deliberate cash grab by the electronics industry.

Envy is a dangerous thing. You can always find someone better than you. Someone who has more money, or a better relationship, or seems to have a better life. It's dangerous because if we're thinking of others as better than us, we're thinking of ourselves as less-than them. The reversal of these roles is the equally dangerous pride, where we think we are better than others. It's a neverending cycle that we can escape from if we choose to: we simply stop comparing ourselves to others. Period.

There is a type of envy that is useful, but I don't like calling it that because it's something that is healthy for us, while the type of envy I've been talking about definitely is not. This other kind I'm talking about is the feeling we have when we're in a meeting and we hear serenity in the share of someone else in the group. It's that moment when we're talking to members of the fellowship and we realize we want what they have. Not their material possessions, not their station in life, but that certain something they have inside that we can't even find words for. We see a kind of peace that seems to radiate outwards from them and we realize we want that for ourselves, too. It's the best advice I've ever heard for choosing a sponsor: find someone who you want what they have.

Envy is evil. Envy is the disease messing with us, telling us we're not good enough, that other people are better than we are. It. Is. Lying. Maybe we don't have lots of money, or a good relationship (or any kind of relationship, for that matter), we are still human beings. We are still people of worth and our lives have value. Don't let the disease tell you any different.