We all come from want. We are born from want of hips and hot breath, from want of family, from want of love, from want of normalcy. We happen from careful planning and accidents alike and are thrust unknowingly into the cold competition we come to know as life. It starts off small. A sibling gets a set of Legos you’ve had your eye on. One of your kindergarten classmates has those shoes that light up that you tell your parents you just need. Your best friend has an in-ground pool when all you have to show is a bathtub. The prom queen also was named the valedictorian and wears a size two without working out.
We are raised believing in the concrete expression of superiority—assigned grades based off of our intelligence, given gold stars for acts of goodwill, gifted candy bars for being good in grocery stores, phone numbers handed out for looking beautiful. Even as children, we can visibly tell, though in a rudimentary way, who is “good” and who is “bad.” Stacy may be nasty but she sports the best dresses, allocating her a status that makes her kind unapproachable whereas Kevin smells of cigarettes and brings his lunch in bags, stamping him with the indelible stain of a loser. We all want to be Stacy’s in a world of cruel children. We want the big houses and shiny toys and the summer vacations to Disneyworld. We have an innate longing for the things we don’t possess, things out of our reach. The desire to physically hold these trademarks of coolness stems from our primitive belief that we are what we have. I’m sure before we became refined enough to give this feeling a name, the cavemen who all the cave babes went weak-kneed for had the most pelts and largest pecks. Why? Because more is better when you could be swallowed whole at any given moment by a sabretooth tiger. The same applies today. We feel safe under the security blanket we weave from our looks and possessions, assuming that our likeability is measured by its thread count.
Envy, you green-eyed glutton. How much of ourselves do we have to relinquish over to you before you are satiated? I’m tired of scrolling through Instagram feeling that bitter sense of rivalry while looking at the pictures of better-looking people wearing better-looking clothes in nicer apartments in cities I’ve never been to. The worst part is recognizing that I am being irrational, that Rosie Huntington-Whitley isn’t trying to make me feel like shit, that someone else has probably felt the same way while looking at me.
Despite all the altruistic kumbaya bullshit that pervades the PC culture of today's society, envy is a very real emotion that cannot be underwritten nor invalidated. How terrifying is it to see peers who we consider of lesser experience clutch positions we've been lusting after since we were playing with beanie babies? Watching individuals accomplish the dreams we had on reservation not only infuriates us because they have achieved what we wanted, but also because we could not. I find myself shooting down the rabbit hole of self-doubt every time I see someone my age get published, disregarding all the branches of logic and support that jut out of the hole’s walls screaming Are you trying to make yourself miserable? The truth is we will never be satisfied. There will always be a bigger house, a shinier toy, an unaffordable resort. I will never be Rosie Huntington-Whitley. And it is ugly, this want. We will hold these secret longings close to our heart, letting them infect the rest of our body with a perpetual stomachache as we starve for the things we cannot have.
