Delphic Maxim 60: Be jealous of no one

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day

60. Be jealous of no one

Today’s subject is jealousy, and of all the unpleasant emotions that people can experience, this has to be the most useless. This is because jealousy functions in a number of ways which I’ll mention: in the envious domain of objects, in the emotional domain of relationships, and in the celebrity-oriented culture of modern life (which is kind of a mix of the two). Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.

Jealousy of objects is the kind of envy we feel when we look at something someone else possesses and want it for ourselves. There’s nothing automatically wrong with wanting more stuff — in fact I’ve just been reading Aristotle’s Politics in which he argues against Plato’s position that private property should be abolished. Aristotle’s argument is that we take better care of things that we own, and he’s right about that. But envy of objects isn’t particularly productive, in fact it leads us to feel like our life is worse than it is. Jealousy in this form becomes a kind of anticipated loss-aversion. We know from behavioural economic that people have a tendency to want to avoid losing things, and I wonder if that manifests as a kind of fear of ‘missing out’, of loss of prestige or status, or imagining a world where we did own something that our friend owns, and then feeling jealous at its symbolic loss.

So let’s knock that one right out. The things that you have are for your own use, and they (hopefully) improve your own life. Don’t be jealous of other people’s stuff.

The second type of jealousy is that which happens in relationships. In a sense, it kind of objectifies human beings, because it makes us feel possessive or envious of other people. At its most destructive, this happens when someone in a romantic relationship becomes suspicious of their partner spending time with other people. Now, I’m not saying if that were to occur people should not care, but jealousy doesn’t really function in that way — jealousy tends to mark an insecurity in our own sense of a relationship. It’s like the property bit: we think we’re missing out on something. Our relationships with other people are uniquely specific, so there’s no way for them to be duplicated, stolen or acquired from anybody else. Jealousy here is unproductive because there isn’t a way to resolve it! People have the relationship that they do with others, or that they do with us, and all that should matter is how our own lives are effected by the time we spend with friends, family, or partners.

So that mode of jealousy can be dismissed as well. The people in your life are in your life, and that’s all that matters!

The third version of jealousy is a particularly modern one, and that’s this weird celebrity-envy that has come about alongside mass communication. When I say mass communication, I don’t just mean social media or even the internet — this has been growing more and more with magazines, newspapers, television and radio. I can’t put hard data around the older stuff, only what I’ve seen and read about from the last 40 odd years, but at the same time as the culture industry that critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote about was standardising a lot of our relations and cultural artefacts, it was also producing particular modes of desire. We desire a particular lifestyle that is largely unachievable. We want this sort of glamorous, ultra-wealthy, celebrity-flooded fame, but we don’t realise that these people are massive outliers. They get a lot of media, but it’s a lifestyle that is extremely uncommon, even in today’s ultra-wealthy West.

Maybe I’m particularly conscious of this third mode of jealousy because I see it a fair bit in the gay community of which I am a part. People binge on credit, live beyond their means, create simulacra of reality on their Instagrams, and develop personalities that reflect the traits of celebrities with money and power. This isn’t to judge, by the way, though I kind of do from time to time (I shouldn’t, people can do their own thing). But I do think that it’s unsustainable — and it often cuts people off from the kinds of activities that actually nourish us (which the Ancient Greeks were keenly aware of): genuine friendship, time spent thinking and philosophising, taking are of health and hearth.

Actually, jealousy in total becomes an energy sink that takes us away from those qualities. I’m certainly as susceptible to it as the next person, which is why I can write about it — it’s a familiar feeling. But it’s one that isn’t useful ever, and today’s maxim is a useful call to reflect whenever we feel jealous. Where is the feeling coming from? How does it actually impact my life? Does allowing this feeling to continue contribute in any way to my friendships, my virtue, my health or my learning?

Most of the time it doesn’t. So be jealous of no one, and enjoy the task of life.