Richard Smith, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky who began studying envy in the nineteen-eighties, writes that the feeling typically arises from a combination of two factors. The first is relevance: an envied advantage must be meaningful to us personally. A ballerina’s beautiful dance is unlikely to cause envy in a lawyer, unless she once had professional dancing aspirations of her own. The second is similarity: an envied person must be comparable to us. Even though we’re both writers, I’m unlikely to envy Ernest Hemingway. Aristotle, in describing envy, quotes the saying “potter against potter.” When we admire someone, we do so from a distance. When we envy someone, we picture ourselves in their place.
.. Benign envy can sound a lot like admiration. The difference is that, while admiration feels good, envy is painful
.. He found that the more closely their feelings aligned with malicious envy the more they complained about the person they envied. (They didn’t do anything about it; they were just nasty.) By contrast, if they felt benign envy they worked harder. Benign envy may be unpleasant, but it’s a driver of change for the better.