What the Stoics said about envy and jealousy

Envy rests on two quiet judgments: that what the other person got is good, and that you are poorer for not having it. The Stoic passages on envy test one or both of them. None of them asks you to pretend the feeling isn’t there.

The price of lettuce

The Enchiridion is the short handbook of Epictetus’s teaching compiled by his student Arrian. One chapter starts with three small ways of being passed over that mattered in Roman social life: at a banquet, in being greeted, and in being asked for advice.

The first move is a fork. Either the thing the other person received is good, and then “you ought to rejoice that he has obtained them,” or it is not, and then there is nothing to be sorry about. Neither branch leaves room for envy.

Then Epictetus goes to the market. An obolus was a small Greek coin. The man who handed it over has his lettuce. You kept your coin, so you have no lettuce, but you have not come off worse: “you have the obolus which you did not give” (Enchiridion 25). Envy only works if you forget about the coin.

The parts of the chapter left out above, slightly shortened, say what the coin stands for.

In Epictetus’s world, favor was bought by calling at a powerful man’s door, walking in his train when he went out, and praising him. The guest who got the dinner paid in flattery and attention. The one who stayed home kept something the guest gave up: “the not flattering of him, whom you did not choose to flatter” (Enchiridion 25).

A modern version: a colleague gets the promotion you wanted. Maybe he took the late calls you let go to voicemail, went to every happy hour and laughed at the director’s stories. Maybe he simply did more of the parts of the job you find dull. Either way he handed something over, and you kept your evenings and your opinion of the director’s stories.

Epictetus does not say the price is never worth paying: “Give then the price, if it is for your interest” (Enchiridion 25). That leaves two respectable positions. You can pay, openly, or you can keep the coin and stop looking at the lettuce. The one position he rules out is the envious one, wanting the goods without the cost, which he calls “insatiable and silly.”

The cost of a title

Seneca wrote On the Shortness of Life to Paulinus, the official in charge of Rome’s grain supply (chapter 18). Near the end, he turns to the people everyone envied: those who had held the highest offices.

The phrase “one year named after them as consul” is literal. Romans identified each year by the names of its two consuls. Seneca’s point is that the one year was bought with many others. In a part of the chapter left out above, he describes men who put up with endless indignities to reach the top office and were left with an inscription on their tomb.

This is the envy of visible success: the friend who made partner, the former classmate on a conference stage, the neighbor whose name is on the new building. Seneca doesn’t call their titles fake. He says “he gains these things by losing so much of his life” (On the Shortness of Life 20) and asks you to look at both halves of the trade. The title is public. The eleven years of weekends that went into it are not.

Marcus Aurelius, who wore the imperial purple himself, recommended a habit that fits here. A purple robe, he noted, is only wool from a sheep, colored with the blood of a shellfish, and he told himself to strip every prized thing of the words that make it look grand (Meditations 6.13). Marcus thought what was left was worthless. You don’t have to go that far for the habit, now sometimes called objective representation, to be useful: a plain description takes some of the shine off a prize, which leaves the price easier to see.

What you have instead

Epictetus gives a short counter-exercise in the Discourses, the lectures Arrian wrote down.

The instruction is to finish the comparison. When you see someone’s money or authority, set something against it on your own side. Epictetus’s candidate is the absence of the craving itself. If you don’t want power or riches, you aren’t short of them, and he counts not wanting riches as something “worth much more” than the riches (Discourses 4.9).

The middle clause keeps this honest: “if you possess nothing in place of them, you are miserable.” The thing you set against their wealth has to be real. Telling yourself you never wanted the job, while you check his profile every week, puts nothing on your side. Something real might be time with your children, work you are proud of, or an actual loss of interest in the prize, and the last of these usually comes slowly.

Looking only upward

Seneca saw how comparison feeds itself. In On Anger he traces one kind of resentment, the grudge against whoever hands out the favors, back to watching what other people got.

The trouble starts with where you look: “if he fixes his attention on that of another” (On Anger 3.31). Envy compares upward, and only upward. A feed of other people’s news shows you the bigger house and the better vacation. It doesn’t show you the much larger crowd who would gladly trade places with you. Seneca’s correction is to look along the whole line, “how many more are below you than there are above you,” not to feel superior to anyone but to see where you actually stand.

His closing verdict is “you keep your accounts wrongly.” He is talking about favors given and received, but envy makes the same error. It enters what other people have at full value and what you have at a discount.

No one better born

Some envy has nothing to do with effort. Someone was born into money, connections or a well-known family name, and the advantage looks unearned because it is. Seneca answered the Roman version of this, pride in ancestry, in On Benefits.

He makes the point while arguing that a slave can do a master a genuine kindness. Seneca was a rich man who owned slaves and never argued for ending slavery. Within that limit the claim is a strong one: nobody is better born than anybody else “except in so far as his disposition is nobler” (On Benefits 3.28).

Apply that to envy of advantage. The colleague whose parents paid for the apartment and the classmate whose uncle made a phone call have something real, and it may well have made their lives easier. By Seneca’s measure it has not made them better, because the only ranking he accepts is disposition, and nobody inherits that. His last line works in both directions: you need despise no one for a “commonplace name,” including yourself.

Envy and jealousy: the Stoic definitions

In everyday English, jealous often does the work of envious, as in “I’m so jealous of your trip.” The Stoics kept these feelings apart. In their list of passions, as reported by Diogenes Laertius (Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 7.111 (opens in a new tab)), envy is a kind of distress at another person’s good fortune. A second kind is distress that someone else has what you want for yourself, and a third is distress that someone else also has what you have.

The third is close to what we mean by romantic jealousy, the fear of sharing someone’s affection with a rival. The Stoic line runs through it too: what another person feels and chooses belongs to them, the lesson now called the dichotomy of control. If the jealousy belongs to a relationship that has ended, see Stoicism and breakups.

What all three share, for Epictetus, is a mistake about where the good is. In Enchiridion 19, put in our own words, he says that if the good lies in what is up to us, envy and jealousy have nowhere to take hold.

A free next step

The first book of the Meditations is Marcus’s list of what he learned from the people around him. He admired his adoptive father, the emperor Antoninus Pius, for deferring without envy to anyone with a particular gift, in public speaking, law or anything else, and for helping each of them win the reputation they deserved (Meditations 1.16, in our words). That is envy turned inside out: you notice someone else’s ability and put some effort into getting it recognized.

When a friend’s or colleague’s success stings, the free Four Virtues check is a good place to take it. It asks what wisdom sees, what justice requires, where courage or restraint is needed, and what you will do next. With envy, wisdom usually asks for an honest look at the price, and justice may simply ask you to congratulate them properly.

If envy keeps coming back, the free Evening Examination is a good place to notice the pattern, since one of its questions asks what outside your control disturbed you today.