Pages

Friday, 11 November 2022

Jealous or envious

While I knew that our emotions are our "responses to social situations", I had not really stopped to consider that our emotions "are shaped by social learning" (Clanton, 2006, p. 410). How we feel emotionally is absolutely socially constructed, "shaped by social [...] forces" (p. 410). Studying emotions can highlight "often-overlooked social aspects of emotions, including the situations that provoke them, the social learning by which they are shaped, their historical and cross-cultural variability, their social usefulness, their contribution to social conflict, and the social arrangements that [we] set up to manage them" (Clanton, 2006, p. 410). We can create the space to question why we 'feel' the way we feel.

Did you know that the emotions of jealousy and envy are different? I had always treated them as synonyms, and only recently found that they are defined differently.  How we 'experience' "jealousy depends in part on [our personal] beliefs about marriage (and relationships leading to marriage), threats to marriage, and appropriate ways of protecting a marriage that is threatened by a third party" (Clanton, 2006, pp. 410-11). Jealousy is about relationships. It is about being social, and feeling special; it is "when you don’t want to share your mum with a sibling, or wish evil upon those you see as your rivals" (Perry, 2022). Jealousy is bound up with fear of loss. "Jealousy is a protective reaction to a perceived threat to a valued relationship or to its quality" (Clanton, 2006, p. 411). Jealousy can also be about power, or "the imbalance of power within the couple" (Clanton, 2006, p. 420). 

Whereas how we 'experience' "envy depends in part on [our personal] beliefs about wealth, status, and power and how they should be distributed" (p. 411). It is about things. It is about accumulation, and - potentially - about hoarding, and control; it is "when someone has something that you want" (Perry, 2022). Envy is about wanting, about resentment, about avarice. Envy is a "negative feeling toward someone who is better off" than we are (Clanton, 2006, p. 424). Envy is also shadenfreude - malicious pleasure that someone has got their 'come-uppance' (Clanton, 2006). Envy can be quite nasty, and it shows itself as gossip. Oh, dear! 

It helps us to think about jealousy and envy separately. Why? Because it allows us to feel the emotions, to consider them, which will then help us to determine what are the most important things... to us. If we can think of envy or jealousy simply as an emotion, or "as information" (Perry, 2022), we can take the time to consider if our feelings are rational, or not. 

We can make the space to 'be', to sit with how we feel in discomfort or in comfort. We can then examine them for flaws, to reflect upon them, and then - if we want to - to change them. To reframe. To reconsider. 

Our feelings - once we identify them are "alerting [us] to what [we] want. It can be hard to work out what we do want in life and envy is a [just a] feeling that can help us identify what our aspirations might be. Think of envy as a catalyst that helps [us] identify and motivate ambition, not as a pathological condition, but a normal part of mental processing" (Perry, 2022).

It is also an interesting fit with the meta-categories of task and relationship from management. It would be interesting to know if there is an alignment between task and envy, and relationship and jealousy. 

But perhaps that is a topic for another day!


Sam

References:

Clanton, G. (2006). Chapter 18: Jealousy and Envy. In J. E. Stets & J. H. Turner (Eds.) Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions (Volume I 1st ed., pp. 410-442). Springer.

Perry, P. (8 May 2022). I am so jealous of everyone else. How can I stop it ruining my life?. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/may/08/ask-philippa-perry-i-am-so-jealous-how-can-i-stop-it-ruining-my-life

No comments :

Post a Comment

Thanks for your feedback. The elves will post it shortly.