Sunday, November 18, 2012

Covetousness, Jealousy, and Envy

It's harder to be happy for you when my desires enter into the picture. Instead of focusing on you and your joy, my mind wanders to me and how much I would like to have what you got.

That's the root, isn't it, when I refuse to rejoice with you or force myself to act happy for you? I am thinking of what I didn't get. The three most common varieties of this are covetousness, jealousy, and envy. Covetousness focuses on the things someone else owns and says, "I want what you have!" Jealousy doesn't focus on things, but on a person, and proclaims, "I want to have you!" Envy takes your dissatisfaction with your own life almost to a pathological self-hatred: "I want to be you!" Covetousness, jealousy, and envy are three expressions of the belief that "If there were any justice in the world, what you have should belong to me. Somehow, somewhere, there's been a mistake and you got what I deserve."

--William P. Smith, Loving Well (Even If You Haven't Been) (Greensboro, NC: New Growth, 2012), 200.

1 comment:

  1. Because those two words are so close, they also are mixed up a lot; people will use "envious" when they mean "enviable," as in "she's in an envious position." She's probably in an "enviable" position, unless there's a yoga move to express "envy." Jealousy Quotes

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