I

Envy: That Guy Goes Past Yet Again in

His Mercedes-Benz

t is not that you wake up in the morning and you say, Now, I’m going
to be envious. It just rises spontaneously,” the Archbishop began, once
again arguing for the naturalness of our emotions and for self-
compassion. “I mean you get up, and you’re trying to be a good person
and that guy goes past yet again, for the third time this week, in his
Mercedes-Benz or some other very nice car. You have been trying not to
feel jealous each time he passes with his car, but this feeling just comes
up.”
Comparison is indeed human—even beyond human; it is natural
throughout the animal world. As the Dalai Lama would point out, even
dogs that are eating together peacefully can suddenly start comparing the
size of their portion to another’s, and a fight can break out with barking
and the gnashing of teeth. But it is for humans that envy can become a
source of great dissatisfaction. There is a Tibetan Buddhist teaching that
says what causes suffering in life is a general pattern of how we relate to
others: “Envy toward the above, competitiveness toward the equal, and
contempt toward the lower.”
Fairness seems to be hardwired into our genes, and so we are very
uncomfortable with inequality of any sort. Primatologist Frans de Waal
has a video of an experiment with capuchin monkeys, our distant
relatives who are often used in psychological tests as proxies for humans.
In the video, which has gone wildly viral, one of the small-headed, long-
limbed gray monkeys gives the experimenter a rock and then receives a
cucumber slice as payment. The monkey is quite happy to do this over
and over, until he sees his neighbor perform the same rock-giving task
but receive a grape. In the world of capuchin monkeys, a grape is a better,
sweeter food than a cucumber. Perhaps for humans, too. After the first