In this episode, Faith Salie, CBS Sunday Morning correspondent and comedian, explores the complex nature of envy and how to harness it for personal growth. Drawing from Faith’s Audible series “Envy Enlightened,” they discuss the different types of envy, how it can be both destructive and motivating, and the importance of acknowledging and transforming it. Through personal stories and expert insights, they emphasize gratitude, self-awareness, and compassion, encouraging listeners to view envy as a natural feeling that, when understood, can guide personal growth and deepen appreciation for one’s own life.
Exciting News!!! Coming in March, 2026, my new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is now available for pre-orders!
Key Takeaways:
- Exploration of the nature and complexities of envy as an emotion.
- Discussion of the parable of the two wolves and its relation to emotions like envy.
- Differentiation between benign (positive) and malicious (negative) forms of envy.
- The impact of modern culture and social media on feelings of envy.
- Personal experiences and reflections on envy, including its evolution over time.
- The importance of recognizing the whole lives of those we envy, not just their successes.
- The role of gratitude as a tool to counteract feelings of envy.
- Distinction between envy and jealousy, and their emotional implications.
- The neuroscience of envy and the concept of “envy grooves” in the brain.
- Strategies for managing and transforming envy into positive action and self-awareness.
Faith Salie is an Emmy-winning contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning and a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! She also hosts the PBS show, Science Goes To The Movies. As a commentator on politics and pop culture, she’s been interviewed by the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Bill O’Reilly, and Anderson Cooper. As a television and public radio host, she herself has interviewed newsmakers from Lorne Michaels to President Carter to Robert Redford, who invited her to call him “Bob.”
Connect with Faith Salie: Website | Instagram
If you enjoyed this conversation with Faith Salie, check out these other episodes:
The Age of Magical Overthinking: Why Our Minds Keep Doubling Down with Amanda Montell
How to Turn Life’s Pain into a Path of Meaning and Joy with Danielle LaPorte
Are Your Desires Really Yours? How to Recognize and Reclaim What You Truly Want with Luke Burgis
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Episode Transcript:
Faith Salie 00:00:00 Envy, I think, to call it one of the seven deadly sins. And that’s arguable. Whether it’s a sin or not, it is the only creative one, because in order to feel envy, you have to make up a story about how someone who has what you want or does what you want to do, how their life is better.
Chris Forbes 00:00:28 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:12 I have listened to today’s guest for years. She’s a correspondent on CBS Sunday Morning, and she also is one of the comedians on a show that I listened to countless times called Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. Her name is Faith Salie. We talk about her book on audible called Envy Enlightened, which is a really great topic because who among us doesn’t feel envy? And she has a rule that I think is a really helpful one. She says you can be envious of or jealous of anyone you want, as long as you take their whole life. Not just the book deal, not just the house, not just the marriage, the whole life, every aspect of it. And I think this is really wise to think about, because we just don’t know the whole of other people’s lives. And very often I have envied someone and then seen some things, or I’ve been like, oh, goodness gracious, I’m glad to be where I’m at. And so we all have this. So I hope you enjoy this. Faith is really wonderful. She turned out to be just as great as I’d hoped, and I really love this conversation and I hope you do too. Hi Faith, welcome to the show!
Faith Salie 00:02:24 I’m so excited to be here to talk about one of my favorite subjects.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:29 Well, it’s lovely having you on because I know your voice very well because you are a frequent guest on NPR’s wait, wait, Don’t Tell Me. So I’ve heard you for years. Yeah. And and now we’re meeting. But we’re not here to talk about. Wait, wait. Don’t tell me. We’re here to talk about a new podcast slash audiobook that you released with audible called envy Enlightened how to Turn a Negative Feeling into a Positive action, which I love the subtitle of that, and I’ve actually loved listening to the whole thing. We’ll get into it in a second, but we’ll start like we always do, with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:13 One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you and your life, and in the work that you do.
Faith Salie 00:03:39 Eric, you can see I’m listening with a big smile on my face because I feel like a little kid at storytime. I think I’m a proxy for all your listeners. This is like, it’s it’s like Mr. Rogers putting on his cardigan and putting on his home shoes to hear this parable.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:54 I’ve got my hoodie on.
Faith Salie 00:03:55 So, yeah, you’re Mr. Rogers with the Mohawk. I love that.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:58 I will take that. I will take that.
Faith Salie 00:04:00 I’ve been listening to you for years, and this is such a incredible parable, because it can intersect with our lives at different times in different ways.
Faith Salie 00:04:09 I love how this speaks to envy and what I’ve learned about envy. Because envy is a kind of hunger. It is a perceived feeling of lack. And I know I’m far from the first person who’s been on this show who said, oh, maybe, maybe the bad wolf isn’t so bad. Maybe. Maybe we don’t name it a bad wolf. In this case, envy is like a wolf’s howl. It is. It is something to listen to. It is a signifier. It is telling us something. And while we certainly don’t want to feed our envy, we can embrace our envy. We can listen to what the wolf is telling us and learn from it. I mean, the irony about trying to starve our quote unquote, bad wolf. Our more negative emotions is that if we feel like we can starve them by denying them, they consume us.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:02 Yeah, yeah, I loved this look at envy very specifically, because it is an emotion that I would say we all feel. And a lot of people say that our modern culture has really taken this very human trait that I think has probably always been in us, but it’s really amplified it, and it’s made it possible to do it and feel it on a scale that we didn’t used to be able to.
Speaker 4 00:05:30 In a way we’re not even aware.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:32 Of. Right. And I relate because I, I can be an envious person. I just have this constant idea of the way things can be better, which is.
Speaker 4 00:05:44 More.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:44 About myself, about my life. And that’s one of my strengths, because it gives me this forward direction to do things. And it’s one of my greatest weaknesses because, you know, everything could be. Could be better.
Speaker 4 00:05:55 It takes you out of the present. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:56 And envy shows you what better might look like. He sort of puts it right there.
Speaker 4 00:06:03 Maybe.
Faith Salie 00:06:04 You know, one of the realizations I had about envy doing this, it was a year long investigation with a lifetime of experience. And I’m going to stop you. You called yourself an envious person, and one of the psychologists on the show said, you’re a person who feels envy sometimes, and that’s for anybody, not just you or me. That doesn’t make you an envious person. Yeah. And I will also applaud you, as I was applauded often during my conversations on this show by people who said, you know what? So few people admit to being envious.
Faith Salie 00:06:36 So few people admit to feeling it, that you’re already ahead of the game if you can recognize it in yourself. But when you talk about envy, maybe painting a picture of how things could be better. Envy. I think if you want to call it one of the seven deadly sins, and that’s arguable whether it’s a sin or not, it is the only creative one, because in order to feel envy, you have to make up a story about how someone who has what you want or does what you want to do, how their life is better. And it’s usually not true. It may point you toward something that you want for your own life. But when we envy people, we’re only seeing a sliver of usually their quite curated life. And we don’t know the whole story and and what we envy in them, or what we envy about their life, may come at quite a cost.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:34 Yeah, recently, I don’t know where I heard it, but it’s been echoing around my brain, which was if you look at what somebody has and you think you want that, you know, you’ve also got to look at the cost they’ve paid to get it.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:46 And are you willing to pay that cost? And if you’re not, then it makes a lot of sense to stop wanting that thing, because you’re not going to get it because you’re choosing not to pay that cost. And it’s very similar to what you’re saying. Right. I got to look at the we have to look at the whole of someone’s life, not just the little bit of it. In my book, I wrote about comparison, and one of the ideas that I think aligns with exactly what you’re saying, and I think you called it the whole to hole theory. Yes.
Speaker 4 00:08:17 Are you proud of that?
Eric Zimmer 00:08:18 Yes. It’s very it’s very good. Is that with comparison, oftentimes the way you make it better is you introduce more data points.
Speaker 4 00:08:26 That’s a good way of putting it.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:27 You simply go, okay, well I’m just focusing on that one aspect of that person. Let me let’s add a lot more data in, but let me hear you say it in your phrase, the whole holly to whole holly theory.
Faith Salie 00:08:43 Yeah. And this comes out of my own life experience and one of the reasons I wanted to do this audiobook, this podcast, is because I’m fascinated with my own journey with envy and my own relationship with it, because I’m in my 50s now, and by many accounts, I’m living my dream life, and I’m so relatively unburdened by envy as compared to how I felt in my 30s when I was grieving my mother’s death. Living in LA as an actor, which is Hollywood, is a petri dish of envy. Yes. Yeah. In a really, really bad relationship. Childless, motherless, jobless, you name it. And I felt a hole then I felt wholly. I constantly felt lack and I wasn’t aware of it. It manifested as resentment towards other people, as almost a feeling of superiority sometimes, which I think was my defense mechanism, which is what we can do if we see someone we envy, we think, oh well, they don’t have x, Y and Z that I have.
Faith Salie 00:09:48 And honestly, rage like a kind of irrational rage at the universe that I, for example, didn’t have a mother. Well, all the young women around me were getting married and shopping for wedding dresses with their mothers. That was a whole I felt in the last two decades, I’ve gotten to a place where I feel like most of my questions have been answered. Whom will I love? Will I become a mother? Where is home? What’s my dream job? Or what are my dream jobs? Plural and part of what I get to do. Eric, as you know, is I get to tell people stories. I get to interview them for CBS Sunday Morning. I also get to tell my own story sometimes as a performer. And when you hear people’s whole story w o l e, you understand that pain comes for everybody. No one’s immune to it. You understand that some of the people you know, I get to interview sometimes extremely famous people, and I get whether they tell me or not, I get glimpses into how their lives aren’t as copacetic as most of us who might envy them would think they are.
Faith Salie 00:10:58 Yeah. Here’s a very specific example. I mentioned that my mom died when I was younger. I was 26 when she died. She was younger than I am now. I was just gutted. We were incredibly close. I spent so much time envying people who had mothers, and then I spent time this. This was unexpected. My envy kind of morphed in my 40s when I had children. I had children at 41 and 43 into envying people who whose parents were grandparents to their kids. I was just so sad for my kids and for my husband, for not knowing my mother and for me. And now that I’m in my 50s and I recently lost my father, I see people my age either losing their parents to cancer or heart attacks or what have you, but also to dementia. And that’s not a pain I’ve had to have. I didn’t have to grieve my parents before they left this earth, and I don’t envy people who still have parents anymore in the same way that I used to. Because I got my parents, I got my parents when I did.
Faith Salie 00:12:05 I wouldn’t want it in any other way, even if I missed out on decades with them. That’s part of seeing people’s whole stories.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:32 Hey friends, as you may have heard, I have a book coming out in March called how a Little Becomes a Lot The Art of small changes for a more meaningful life. And I am gathering together a book launch team. It’s a small circle of people who feel connected to the work and want to help it, to find its way to the people who need it. What being on the team is like is going to be pretty simple. It’s going to be sharing the book with someone who might come to mind, leaving a review if it makes sense, sharing on social media, whatever works for you. As we move closer to launch, we’ll have behind the scenes reflections, early access moments, special giveaways in a few ways for the team to connect along the way. We’ll have some fun, we’ll get to know each other, and hopefully we’ll get the book out there to more people. If you’d like to be part of this special circle, you can go to oneyoufeed.net/help. That’s one you feed. Net help. I want to talk a little bit more about envy as a thing. Yeah. Defining it. The different types of envy.
Faith Salie 00:13:31 Like before nerdy about it.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:33 Let’s get nerdy. So what is envy?
Faith Salie 00:13:35 One of the people we returned to on my show over and over is Sarah Potocki, who is a professor at the University of Puget Sound in Washington. Sarah Potocki wrote a book, in fact, called The Philosophy of Envy and her. Here’s the official definition an aversive response to a perceived inferiority or disadvantage vis a vis a similar other with regard to a good that is relevant to the sense of identity of the envious. Okay, let’s break that down. So a negative feeling of perceived and I think that’s really important right. The person who feels envy. You have to be looking out on the world. You’re not looking inward. You are comparing yourself and you are comparing yourself to someone who is enough like you, who cares about the same things you do.
Faith Salie 00:14:29 Right. So, Eric, I don’t envy Simone Biles. I think she’s amazing, but we don’t share what a philosopher or sociologist would call a domain. Like, I can’t do a split. Yeah, and she’s she’s the goat. So to sort of pinpoint how specifically envy hinges on a shared domain. Researchers at the University of San Diego did the study, and its results even surprised them. They were trying to gauge how much people felt envy versus people who maybe worked with them, and they found that women almost only envy women, and men almost only envy men within five years of their age. It’s that specific. And they and they were surprised because they thought at least some women would envy men similar to their age, who were making more in the same position and envy. Works like that. Like it’s this icky feeling we feel when we look around and we think, hey, that person’s enough. Like me. Why don’t I have what they have.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:33 Yeah, I’m trying to think through in my own mind.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:36 There are females that I can envy.
Faith Salie 00:15:40 That’s very feminist of you. I like that about you.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:43 I know, I know.
Faith Salie 00:15:44 Yeah. And there are men I envy, too. But.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:46 Yeah, but. Yeah, but in general, I think that’s true. Right. Because I think the, the underside and part of envy to me is just simply desire. That’s a component I think of.
Faith Salie 00:15:57 It is desire I want.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:58 I want right. And I want you can want without pointing it at a person who has it. You can just say, I just want that.
Faith Salie 00:16:06 Yeah. Like, dude, I love your sneakers. Where do you get them?
Eric Zimmer 00:16:08 Yeah, but the underbelly to it that you talk about and that I really see, is there enough like you that you like you said, you feel like you should be able to do what they’ve done. And so there’s a feeling of, at least for me, a failure underneath it or I don’t quite I don’t know if that’s quite the right word, but you sort of I sort of associate it with like desire and then also some sort of personal, personal.
Faith Salie 00:16:35 Self-condemnation like why did why don’t. Why didn’t you get that? And you see that in yourself because you’re a really hard worker and a self-aware person. Other people might feel envy and think, oh, that person only got that because of the color of their skin, or that person only got that because their parents are rich or connected. There’s a million ways we can process our envy. The type of envy you describe, which is one I occasionally feel as well, can lead us to a good kind of envy called emulating envy, which is that we see something and we think, oh, that person has that. I feel discomfort. It’s more than saying, hey, I like your shoes. Where did you get them? Envy comes with an with a discomfort with with an uncomfortable feeling. And if that feeling drives someone like you or someone like me or some of your listeners to say, hey, I feel discomfort. That means I really want this thing, whatever it is. Usually we’re not even talking about material objects.
Faith Salie 00:17:37 It’s, oh gosh, that person just just wrote a play that got that got put on stage. Why do I feel discomfort? Oh, because I’ve been wanting to write a play for two years and I have all these notes. And why haven’t I sat down and done this? And am I lazy? Do I not manage my time well? It makes you sort of do an inventory and think, how do I get what they got in my own way? And I bring up Amulet of Envy. I think it’s important to note that researchers say that there are two kinds of envy benign and malicious. And interestingly, many languages have two words for envy. In English, we just say envy. Right? But Russian, Thai, German, Danish, lots of languages have two different words. Some of them call it white envy and black envy. Kind of like the wolves. So it’s it’s worth noting. I even talked to a rabbi who calls it holy envy or holy information. Because ideally, if we can recognize it and harness it and not expend our energy wishing ill on the person who has what we want, then we can use it to help us realize our dreams.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:50 A couple people come to mind when I think of that sort of emulation of envy, but the envy is a much smaller part of it than it is in other cases. But for me, you know, one of the people that I envied slash looked up to and still do is Krista Tippett. And on being, you know, when I started, I was like that. I pointed at it and I was like that. That’s what you know. I want to make something that good. Yeah. You know, Jonathan Fields good life project. Same feeling like, okay, that’s what I want. I want to do that. So there’s a little teensy bit of envy in that, but it’s mostly Positive emulation. And I and I love that you’re breaking this apart because I’ve often thought about this, this thing like, when is envy helpful to me and when is it not? And I love the fact that researchers and even languages make a distinction between the two.
Faith Salie 00:19:42 Yeah. I want to add when you were citing Krista Tippett, and I’m also a huge fan of hers, I was really sad when she changed the name of her show from I Used to Be on Faith.
Faith Salie 00:19:51 I’m kind of like that now. It’s on being. I always get a little shout out with my name, but I Sarah Potocki, just a terrible.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:59 It was like.
Faith Salie 00:19:59 Just a terrible self-referential joke. Sarah Pataki’s book is called The Philosophy of Envy, and at the front she dedicates it to her two children, and she says, May you learn to love and envy. Well, and so I would say you have envied, well, you know, choose the people you want to envy. Well, you know, so Sarah Potocki, this philosopher, she has this taxonomy of envy which I found to be so helpful with my own understanding of myself. She breaks envy down into four kinds. One is the Amulet of envy, which we call the good envy, the benign envy. She talks about inert envy, and this was a real game changer just for me to have an understanding and language around it. Inert envy is a kind of envy you feel when someone has something that you can never have.
Faith Salie 00:20:51 You can’t beat yourself up about it because you can’t make it happen, so there’s nothing you can do to get it. So for me, that was the death of my mother, and I have been wondering for years, why why does this keep you know? In addition to my grief about losing her, why does this envy about mothers and grandmothers keep coming back? Why can’t I keep that at bay, or make it go away and just accept her death and be grateful? She was my mother. And it is because it is this inert envy that there’s nothing I can learn to do with except recognize it as such.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:27 That makes a lot of sense. So we’ve got Amulet of Envy. We’ve got a new envy.
Faith Salie 00:21:33 Yeah. She also talks about aggressive and spiteful envy. Aggressive envy is when you just don’t like that person. You almost don’t care what they got or what they’ve achieved. You just don’t want that person to have it. And spiteful envy is not so much about the person, but about the good.
Faith Salie 00:21:53 You want to spoil the good. Oh, I audition for that show. I didn’t get in it. I hope it flops. I hope it gets terrible reviews.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:00 So where is an envy? That’s something like when you see somebody who’s had a lot of success. And then you mentioned this a little bit earlier, you see somebody who’s had a lot of success, and then in your mind you’re sort of then going, yeah, but I mean, they’re you know, there’s what they do is shallow. It’s not it’s not deep. Where does that fall in our envy taxonomy?
Faith Salie 00:22:20 It’s a good question. It sounds like that reaction doesn’t make you want kind of keeps you on the couch, right? That kind of reaction is like, I’m not going to try because.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:30 Yeah, a little bit or it’s just.
Faith Salie 00:22:32 Seems a little just this is just according to her taxonomy. I mean, I would say that’s a little bit aggressive. It’s sort of like, that that person stinks. Why do they get that?
Eric Zimmer 00:22:41 I think it is aggressive.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:42 I’m interviewing, right after you, someone named Amanda Mantell, who wrote a book about magical overthinking. But she talks about about this very exact thing in the book where she talks about shit talking. People who are more successful than her in her place. Right? So it’s, you know, you just put them down as a way to assuage how you feel.
Faith Salie 00:23:05 This kind of slides up against something I talked with Doctor Robert Baldinger about, and I know he’s been on the show, you and I. You know him. You love him. Bob Baldinger, he wrote The Good Life. He’s a Buddhist monk, right? Buddhist priest.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:19 Zen Buddhist priest, I think.
Faith Salie 00:23:20 Yeah. Yeah. A psychiatrist, actually, at Harvard. And I said to him, you know, one of the ways I occasionally deal with envy is I start listing all the things I have that I’m grateful for. But what I don’t like is when it becomes a slippery slope that I start listing things that make me sort of better than that other person.
Faith Salie 00:23:42 Like, oh, they have that, but I have this. And again, I don’t really mean material things. Yeah, yeah. And I’m not going to list them because they’ll make me sound like an asshole. But but it’s this defense mechanism we have. And you know, as Bob so often does, he’s like, that’s okay. If it gets you through that moment that you need to remember what you have in that way. That’s okay.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:06 Okay. So we’ve gone through the types of envy and it shows up in in different ways. Let’s talk about very quickly the difference between envy and jealousy because we tend to use those words interchangeably. But I think in the science of emotions or research on emotions, distinctions are made.
Faith Salie 00:24:27 Yeah, they’re actually they’re actually quite different because jealousy is about loss. It’s about fearing someone’s going to take away something valuable to you. And usually it’s in a romantic situation. And envy is about lack. That’s the difference. Jealousy is about the fear of loss and needing to feeling like you need to protect it. And envy is about feeling a perceived lack.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:51 That’s interesting.
Faith Salie 00:24:52 People often say, okay, think of the play Othello. So Iago represents envy and Othello represents jealousy. He’s jealous that people are going to take Desdemona away from him.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:06 Got it? So envy is one of the seven deadly sins. And you, you talk with a.
Faith Salie 00:25:11 Least fun one. Eric.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:13 Well, that’s what stood out to me. When? When you were talking about it in the book was it’s the only deadly sin. That’s no fun.
Faith Salie 00:25:21 Yeah, yeah. Pride can feel good. You know, greed.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:25 Lust doesn’t like a little gluttony, I mean.
Faith Salie 00:25:27 Lust. Yes, exactly, exactly. It doesn’t. It doesn’t feel good. Tanya Menon, who’s a professor we interviewed. She’s a psychologist at Ohio State in the business school, and she said.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:37 She’s in my town.
Faith Salie 00:25:38 Oh, yeah? Yeah. She’s incredible. She talks about how to deal with envy in the workplace, and she calls it an undignified emotion. It makes us small. It is a poison we give ourselves. And that’s why it’s no fun. It just feels awful.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:56 Yeah. I also thought in that section there was something that was really interesting. You were talking with a priest of some ilk and he was talking about sin, and then he was also talking about the idea of of vice and virtue and what I thought was really interesting was that when they talked about vice and virtue, they talked about it in a habitual sense. Yes. In a sense that, like, maybe the sin kicks the thing off, but the repetition of it is what makes it a vice or a virtue. And I’m very interested, obviously. I wrote a book all about how things change in small increments. Yes. I never heard that phrase that way. I never thought of it. But it does make a lot of sense.
Faith Salie 00:26:41 It makes so much sense. I also learned from him this was father of Rozelle, a Catholic priest in Alabama. I’m a word nerd, and I had never combined in my brain that the word vicious comes from vice.
Faith Salie 00:26:54 Oh, so if something is a vice, it it makes you vicious. Yes, because I was raised Catholic. If I am still Catholic, I’m a terrible Catholic. But I feel sort of culturally Catholic, even though I’m raising Jewish children. It’s fun. We do lots of holidays, But a lot of Catholicism is about what are you thinking? Confess your thoughts even. Right. And so I said to him, you know, if we feel envy, if we’re thinking, I want what that person has. And that person doesn’t deserve it, is that a sin? And as you noted, he said, it becomes a sin if it leads you to repeatedly wish ill harm on people or do things that take them down in some way. And when it comes to habits, one of the incredible aspects of this investigation of envy was how many practices dovetail. So we talk about habits within this spiritual notion of if you’re habitually envious, that could become a sin and then that could become a vice. I also talked to a neuroscientist.
Faith Salie 00:28:03 If you habitually have envious thoughts, you are literally creating envy grooves in your brain. If you habitually go on Instagram and scroll and check on those people, you know whose table scapes you’re comparing your dinner party with. You are creating an algorithm that will keep feeding you the things that make you feel bad. Yeah. What we don’t want envy to become is a habit. What we want envy to become, if we have it, is something that makes us sort of tilt our head and get curious. It’s a visitor. It has information for us. What we don’t want is a habit.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:59 When we think of habit, we generally think of an outward behavior. You know there habits of habits of behavior. And that’s a really important element. And there are habits of thought. Yes, in my experience, those are the really hard ones to fix. They’re harder to fix than the behavior. Now the behavior is driven by internal thoughts and all that. But but the behavior.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:22 There are ways to do the behavior. And I keep referencing my book, which I feel is obnoxious. And, you know, we talk about habits of behavior and habits of thought. And I love this idea of the repetition. I really also love what you just said, because I hadn’t I didn’t hit it in quite that way before that. The algorithm is another version of feeding us that. Yes, that thing that’s particularly insidious.
Faith Salie 00:29:51 Bob Baldinger says our minds secrete thoughts. So the first thing to do is to realize almost all of us are going to feel envy. You just are. I mean, that’s evolutionary biology. It was part of our survival thousands of years ago. So first of all, notice the thought. Oh, maybe that person’s not such an asshole. Maybe I’m just feeling envious, right? First of all. Okay, why do I feel uncomfortable? Here, I’ll give an example from my own life. And I talk about this in in the audiobook. I have intermittently struggled with envy when it comes to people’s homes.
Faith Salie 00:30:30 Okay, so I choose and I’m using that word very intentionally. I choose to live in New York City. If I didn’t live in New York City, I could live in a pretty darn big house with a nice yard. We could have two cars.
Speaker 5 00:30:42 Blah blah blah.
Faith Salie 00:30:43 We choose to live in New York City because it aligns with our values. I want to be able to walk and not have a car. I want to walk to the theater Central Park. I don’t have to mow the lawn. I can walk to the museum. And my kids love it here too. However, that also means that we live. Currently we live in a rented two bedroom apartment with four people, two children going through puberty. Boring a girl? That’s hilarious. That’s a podcast. But I found that when my kids started kindergarten and they both happened to go to some fancy schools, we’re not fancy people. We’re fortunate, we’re good. We’re not fancy. And I was going to pick them up from a playdate, and I would be looking for the apartment number, and then it’d be like, oh my God, there’s no apartment number.
Faith Salie 00:31:25 These people live in this entire brownstone, which, if you’re vaguely familiar with New York City, means they’re loaded, right? And and they don’t have Lego all over the floor. They have like, they have, like, a room for Lego. You know, I would feel envy. And I started to watch my thoughts about that. So there’s there are several things that I have done to deal with my thoughts about other people’s homes. Okay. One is, if I knew and this is back in the days when I had to go pick up my kids. They’re older now. If I knew I was going over to somebody’s apartment, I’d actually visualize it. I’d think like, okay, you’re gonna their housekeeper is going to open the door and you’re going to slip off your shoes and you’re going to stand in their foyer. Because you don’t call it a foyer when it’s worth $12 million. And and you’re probably going to feel a little outraged that you, in fact, don’t have a washer dryer in your home.
Faith Salie 00:32:17 And they have somebody doing their laundry. And I just sort of breathe through that ahead of time. By the time I picked up my child, it’d be like, oh my gosh, your home is beautiful, and hug my kid and get out the door and not, you know, look like the green eyed monster. I had a real breakthrough. I was doing a dream job, I did an Off-Broadway solo show, and the New York Times was doing a story on me. And they do this thing where it’s like how someone lives in their apartment, and they came over to our apartment, and usually it’s famous people’s fancy apartments. They came to our apartment and there was the Lego, and there were the kids art all over the wall. And I thought, I thought, I can’t be negative about this home that we live in. And I had this kind of metanoia. Do you know that word?
Eric Zimmer 00:33:03 I don’t.
Faith Salie 00:33:04 It’s a Greek word that means a kind of spiritual conversion. It’s like an epiphany, but it has, like, a spiritual taste to it.
Faith Salie 00:33:10 It’s. It’s Greek. I had this kind of epiphany. If I were a set designer, and I were told, you’re designing a set for a play about a family that is very fortunate, very happy, very colorful, very silly, two working parents, two incredibly artistic children who don’t stop making artwork that needs to be taped to the wall. Everywhere. There’s a Lego on the floor. There are books all over the place. There are just towers of books. And, you know, it’s a little bit messy. What would it look like? And I thought, oh, it would look like this home. This is my home because this is my life and I don’t want another life. If I had a few more square feet, that’d be great. But this is what the set designer would make. And I truly, ever since then, it changed the way I feel about this rather small space we live in.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:58 That’s really lovely.
Faith Salie 00:34:00 Thanks.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:01 It’s really lovely because home envy, I think, is a pretty common thing.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:05 It’s one of the more prominent envies that I get. Strangely enough.
Faith Salie 00:34:10 Meaning? Like you feel it too?
Eric Zimmer 00:34:11 A little bit, but are I more feel it for. Like I’ve lived in Columbus for almost all my life. I’ve spent a couple of years in California, and I’ve talked about getting out of here for a significant portion of that time, and it wasn’t possible for a bunch of reasons for a long time. It’s possible now, and we just don’t know where to go. Like we literally get stuck on it’s all trade offs, like you talked about. You made a choice. This is the choice you’ve made. And I just think we stay because we haven’t picked the trade offs we’re willing to live with yet. but back to house envy. So you’ve got this new feeling about the place you’re in, right? And that feels good if you walk into a multi-million dollar home in New York with somebody who does something similar to you and has two children. Envy still pops up, right?
Faith Salie 00:35:07 Sure, yeah.
Faith Salie 00:35:09 And then I’ll say, I’ll notice it. I’ll have prepared for it. Eric?
Eric Zimmer 00:35:13 Yes.
Faith Salie 00:35:13 It’s good. And I’ll notice it and I’ll think. All right. Well, I don’t know. Her partner probably makes more money than mine does. And then you know what? I’ll think? Because this is usually true. My husband is so present as a father. And if he made a different decision to have a different type of job that took him away all the time, my kids wouldn’t be as happy. They wouldn’t be as close. This is a story I’m making up. It may not be true, but I think it is. And it feels better. And it grounds me in gratitude for who my husband is. And I’ll add another because I recently had this experience. Like I said, my kids share a room and my daughter’s 11.5. My my son is 13.5. My daughter occasionally tortures him by, you know, not putting on a shirt, and he’s like.
Speaker 6 00:36:00 Oh my God.
Faith Salie 00:36:01 But it makes us all laugh.
Faith Salie 00:36:03 And when I close the door to their room at night, I hear them and they go to separate schools so they don’t really get to see each other during the day. I hear them making each other laugh so hard. I’ll have to go in. It’ll be way past my bedtime and I’ll stick my head in the door and I’ll say, you, y’all, you have got to go to sleep. They started this thing recently where they they have tons of stuffies, stuffed animals, and they take their favorite stuffy of the evening, wrap it up in a blanket, and then they say one, two, three switch. And they throw each other their favorite stuffy. And then they unwrap it and they’re like, oh my gosh, you gave me Dennis! Or you gave me Jerry and my children, who also fight a lot. They would never be this close if they didn’t have to share a room. And I’m telling you, they are bonded for life. Closer than any siblings I know because we live in 1100 square feet again.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:56 Lovely. There’s this turning towards what you do have that seems to be pretty fundamental to working with envy. So you started the process. You you notice it’s there. Yeah. I think you’ve got this a little bit second nature. So let’s slow it down for someone else. You notice it’s there. Yeah. What’s the next step.
Faith Salie 00:37:16 By the way? Everything I’ve just outlined, it’s been a long time coming, right. Some. Sometimes we have to grow into our gratitude 100%. A lot of folks, experts on this show, from various walks of life, from psychiatry to doctors of brains to to rabbis and reverence, said, where do you feel it? In your body, like check in with your body. What are you feeling? And I find personally, Eric, that this this is an effective tool. If I’m looking at social media, I don’t look at social media that much at all. Number one, I’m so busy. Number two I don’t let my kids have phones, so I don’t want them to see me at home.
Faith Salie 00:37:59 Scrolling through a phone doesn’t seem right. And number three, it doesn’t usually feel good. It really doesn’t. And I literally feel it in my body. I kind of feel sometimes a discomfort in my chest and a lot of times a discomfort in my stomach. And that’s like a very important point to check in with your whole body and see how it feels, because you’re probably experiencing maybe it’s depending on your feed, it could be some kind of fear. But a lot of times, especially with Instagram, I feel like Instagram is envy incorporated.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:33 Yeah.
Faith Salie 00:38:34 Then there is a thought exercise of what would it be like to have the thing I want. Like, what would it be really like the sort of old story. Again, envy is a creative sense. You can make up a story that it would be fantastic to have what you think you want, But we also usually don’t pause to think of what you and I keep talking about the costs of things. I have a friend who used to be married to a billionaire, and there were times I would think, oh God, it’d be so convenient to be married to a billionaire.
Faith Salie 00:39:08 But then I would think, oh, but then I’d have to be married to him. And there’s really nothing I like about that person. I don’t like the kind of medias. I don’t like the kind of business person he is. I don’t like the kind of dad he is from what I know about it. And you know what else? I don’t want a home in Jackson Hole, in the Hamptons, in X, Y, and Z. I don’t want to have to be a household manager. I want to do what I do. And it was interesting because a mutual friend of ours once said to me, you know, Faith so-and-so, and she’s, this woman is so lovely. She envies you. She wishes she could do what you do. And it was such a good reminder. This is a this is such a this is like a little hack, Eric. But every once in a while, if people share with you what they envy about you. I don’t mean to collect this information as a self-aggrandizing tool, but just sometimes it’s a good little recalibration.
Faith Salie 00:39:59 Oh, to some people, I have an enviable life.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:04 Yeah, I was just having this conversation with a friend recently who by many, many standards has been very successful. He’s written multiple books. He’s made a living doing what he does, and he’s in a little bit of a spot where he’s feeling like he’s failed him because it’s still hard. And his book came out on the same day that someone else’s book came out. They were next to each other on the shelves, and this other person has gone on to mega stardom, and he gets to do what he does, which is a huge privilege. Yeah, but with him, it was from the outside. It was so obvious to me that countless people would say, I envy what he has. He’s looking at one person and comparing himself against that person. And boy, that’s a rough way to go.
Faith Salie 00:40:59 That’s something this word smallness and narrowness and contraction kept coming up through the show. Because when we envy someone, even when I think, look at me like my eyes are narrowing, our focus narrows.
Faith Salie 00:41:13 It becomes almost a mini obsession. And when we are feeling most expansive, don’t you find that when you’ve had a great day, you feel loved, you feel loving, you feel creative. You can rejoice for everybody else. In fact. In fact, Tanya menon, the professor at Ohio State, when they did workplace research about how to deal with envy in the workplace, one of the exercises they did was they they had people write down a list of their values and things that they know they’re good at, and they had one group do that and then listen to a colleague’s ideas. And another group didn’t do that and listen to a colleague’s ideas. What do you think the result was?
Eric Zimmer 00:41:54 I’m sure the first group was more receptive to what their colleagues had to say.
Faith Salie 00:41:59 Great ideas. That’s great. We can collaborate on that. And the other group was like, I don’t know. I think I could do better. You know. Yeah. And I wanted to add to the sort of, you know, the action items, the list of what we can do when we identify envy in ourselves.
Faith Salie 00:42:13 I don’t know if everybody’s built for this, but I’m a pretty confessional person. I have found occasionally confessing my envy in a moment. You know, not anything really deep. Not like, oh, my God, you have a mother. My mother died. You’re lucky. Right? But if someone’s like, if someone’s saying like, oh, my husband and I are going away for the weekend and you know, and oh, who’s going to take care of the kids? Oh, the grandparents, I’ll say, ooh, I’m having childcare envy right now. Right. And it just feels like an unburdening. I don’t have to carry that around with me. And usually somebody else will say, yeah, I’m really lucky. And I have this thought in my head. I won’t say it out loud, but good. I’m glad you know you’re lucky. So. And maybe that comes from being raised Catholic. Confession. Not always a bad idea.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:57 I don’t know if it’s Catholic. I mean, maybe Catholics took a practice that I think is generally good and institutionalized it or I was recently in Portugal for almost five weeks, which is incredible, right? Incredible.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:13 We had friends who were gone and we got to stay in their apartment, and I and I was working, but still amazing. Incredible. But there was a point in that trip where me and my partner Jenny, and a couple other people were doing something, and she turned to me and she looked at me and she goes, you’re feeling envious, aren’t you? And I said, yes, I am.
Faith Salie 00:43:36 I can’t wait to hear what you’re envious about.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:38 Well, it influences people that I have relationships with, so I’m not really willing to.
Faith Salie 00:43:42 But what a perspicacious partner.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:44 Indeed. Indeed. And then I had the exact experience you’re talking about, which is, as time went on from this particular moment and this thing, I started adding more data points in. And I went, oh no, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t trade lives. Yeah, I wouldn’t trade lives. Yeah.
Faith Salie 00:44:04 Yeah. We talk about this on the podcast. My husband and I have this acronym TGT, which stands for the Total Jealousy Theory, which in this case jealousy means envy.
Faith Salie 00:44:14 Our friend Julie coined this. She died at 49. And before she died, she had told us, I live with the TGT, the total jealousy theory, which means you can be envious of or jealous of anyone you want. As long as you take their whole life, you take their whole life, you take all of it and then you’re allowed to run away with your jealousy. Enjoy it, you know, marinate in it. When we talk about confession, I also just want to bring another word into this. I had this a spiritual roundtable in which I talk with a rabbi, a reverend, and a priest all at once about how envy is seen in Egypt.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:50 Have you written a joke after it? I mean, you are a you are a comedian.
Faith Salie 00:44:53 Exactly. And Reverend Jackie said, what you do is what we do in service. It’s testimony. It’s testimony, which is another way of confession. It’s it’s it’s your you’re being vulnerable enough. People don’t want to talk about envy.
Faith Salie 00:45:10 Let’s normalize it. I let my kids talk about it. Let’s take the shame away. Let’s harness it. Give her testimony and then let us investigate it so it shines a light on. Hey, what do we want? Or like you just said, what do we actually think we want? But maybe we don’t. And there’s one other aspect of envy. And this was very talk about envy. Enlightened. This was such an enlightening moment for me. During the show, I was talking with my dear friend Kathryn Grody. Unlikely, you know, septuagenarian social media star. She’s married to Mandy Patinkin, who is also our dear friend, this wonderful couple spreading joy in the world. They’re a good use of social media. That’s a good algorithm. And Catherine and I, I was asking her if she ever felt envy for her husband’s career. We were talking about envy, and she knows that I still envy people who perform on Broadway. Like that is still. That’s my bucket list thing here. And I still feel like I’m going to.
Faith Salie 00:46:09 That’s why that’s a why not? That’s on the why not list. I still think I’m going.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:12 To I think so, yeah. You got, you got you got got a lot of time.
Faith Salie 00:46:15 Yes. Thank you. But she started laughing and she said that is the most ridiculous thing about you. Faith. Now her husband has performed on Broadway many times. I don’t think he wants to return to Broadway. He’s done it. She said. That’s your 16 year old dream. You know, I picture me at 16. I was a child performer. I had a big perm. I had the, you know, permanent jazz hands. And it is true that when I was, I, when I was 16, I wanted to be Bernadette Peters. I still do, but she said, you know what you get to do now? She said, I guess if I envy anyone, it’s that you get to do what you do because I like you, Eric. We get to talk to fascinating people all the time and learn from them and ask them incredible questions.
Faith Salie 00:46:59 It is it is such a gift to do what we do. And she said, I think you need to tell your 16 year old self that’s like, that’s not the whole dream. I think you need to let that go. And so one of the words applied to Envy by Laura markham, who is a who’s a psychologist on the show, is that there’s also a grief aspect. You do get to a place in your life, and maybe this goes with inert envy, where some things that you think you want or you have wanted, you’re never going to have. And there’s a grief with that. I think parents is very taboo to talk about. But I think sometimes parents have dreams for their children that they need to let go of on their children’s behalf because their children get to live their own lives, and their children may never, quote unquote, achieve the things the parents want for them. And if the parents hang on to that, they can end up whether they realize it or not, envying other parents their family’s experiences.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:58 Yep. I’m familiar. Yeah. You know, I’ve got a son there. There are times I’ll hear somebody talk about what their child is doing and, oh, you know, there’s a there’s a little bit of that that gets mixed in there. I think the other thing that for me is, is an antidote. No, no, let me rephrase that, because there is no antidote for envy. Yeah. Another of the tools for me is and we sort of talked kind of around it, around gratitude. It’s recognizing two things. One, the me of a decade ago would be thrilled. Thrilled with the life that I have. It mean if you told him, hey, you get to have this, he’d be like, that’s it, I’m set. I’m happy forever. So that’s one thing. But then the flip side of that, or the other piece of that is to recognize here I am with that stuff, and I’m not permanently happy because that doesn’t exist. And that the things that we think we want, we get them sometimes.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:04 And that’s good. I’m not saying it’s not a good thing, but it’s not the arrival moment we think it is. It’s not the the permanent happiness. It’s life is life. I could live where I live now. I could live in a 10,000 square foot home. And you know what? I still have this brain.
Faith Salie 00:49:23 And that.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:23 Heart and this way of relating to the world. Yeah. And the sort of law of habituation says I will eventually, Fairly soon take what I have for granted. And so for me, it’s.
Faith Salie 00:49:36 The hedonic treadmill, right?
Eric Zimmer 00:49:37 Right. It’s seen that whole picture. So not only do I have to picture that person’s whole life, I have to picture the whole reality of me getting that thing, that it’s not as important to my well-being as I think it is.
Faith Salie 00:49:51 Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:53 You talk about that shrinking down. There’s a I don’t know if I’m going to get it right, but it’s a famous line from Daniel Kahneman, which is like nothing is as important as it is when you think about it.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:04 Meaning like when you think about something, it assumes huge importance. It is not that important. If you’re not zoomed in and it’s that same thing, it’s yes, achieving things, doing things that are good. And, you know, I thought, well, if I get to write a book, well, you know, I’ve written a book, I think it’s pretty good.
Faith Salie 00:50:22 Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:23 Still, again, the whole mechanism of wanting and desire has to be worked with.
Faith Salie 00:50:30 I so completely agree. I really don’t want this to sound like bragging because I promise it’s not. I have six Emmys. If you had told me in my 30s that I would ever win one Emmy, I would have thought I would have imagined a whole life around having won Emmy statuette, that life would have been like, I don’t know, a gigantic apartment on Central Park West just offers that I’d have to wade through for all my next work. Whatever. Whatever it would be. Right. Yeah. Unlimited free facelifts, whatever.
Faith Salie 00:51:03 Whatever it is. By the way, the reason this isn’t bragging is because I have six Emmys, because I’m part of this iconic TV show at CBS Sunday Morning, which has won Emmys. And I get to be on it. Right? It’s not like Faith salie only gets the Emmy. So that’s why I feel comfortable sharing that. I forget I have six Emmys because they’re. Oh, and by the way, I just want everyone to know this. if you are at my level, you have to pay for your Emmys, so I just I just want to I just want everyone to understand learning, like, the whole story of somebody, you know, on a show like CBS Sunday Morning, there’s I don’t know how many people work on it at 60. They can’t give everybody an Emmy. We all won one, but I have to pay for Miami, so I’ve paid for.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:44 The actual physical thing. The statue.
Faith Salie 00:51:46 I’m not bribing judges. Yeah, so?
Eric Zimmer 00:51:50 So I was going to say that.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:52 Yeah. Like I’d like to know more about this bribing game.
Faith Salie 00:51:55 Yeah, that’s for a different podcast. So I forget I have six Emmys because they’re up there. When I first got most of them, they were not baby proof. We put them away from the children so they wouldn’t poke their eyes out with an Emmy. Now they’re up on a on a just up with the books in the Lego and the stuff, and I forget I have them. And then occasionally someone comes over and looks up and is like, I can register their surprise because a, I probably don’t seem like an Emmy winner to them. Just, you know, my sweats and my hair back and whatever. And B, we live in this, we live in this apartment we live in.
Speaker 6 00:52:27 You know, I didn’t have a.
Faith Salie 00:52:29 Housekeeper open the door. I don’t have a butler. And so it is to your point that the life I would have imagined that would come with having six Emmys isn’t the life I have now.
Speaker 6 00:52:41 And I love.
Faith Salie 00:52:42 The life I have now. I don’t need the Emmys. I love the life I have now, but I would if you had told me in my 30s, you will have an amazing husband. You will have two hilarious children. You will get to be on CBS Sunday morning. You will get to be on the one you feed. You will get to be on. Wait, wait, don’t tell me. Settle down like, yeah, I would have been like that. That’s it, that’s it, that’s that’s all I need. Envy will never touch me again.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:07 Right? And that’s not the truth.
Faith Salie 00:53:09 It’s not the truth because our minds secrete thoughts, as Bob Wallinger tells us.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:14 They most certainly do. I’d like to end with a phrase or a word that I’ve heard and I love, and you reference it, which is to talk about maldita. Before we wrap up here.
Faith Salie 00:53:30 You know, Eric, I have two frozen embryos because I can’t afford to have two more children in New York City.
Faith Salie 00:53:36 And I’m always naming them, like when I hear a good word, I’m like, oh, I’ll name my embryo that. So I feel like one of them is named Moneta.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:42 What was the other term you just told me a little while ago? I’ve always noia metanoia. That’s a good embryo name.
Faith Salie 00:53:48 Yeah. Madina and metanoia. Eminem. My my embryo twins. it is Sanskrit, and it means rejoicing at the good of another. It is the opposite of envy. It’s the opposite of schadenfreude. And we know it’s possible. We know it’s possible. We all have moments of mudra. What we want to do is make the ratio of moody to to not moody to bigger and bigger. Right?
Eric Zimmer 00:54:14 Yeah. I mean, the Dalai Lama put it in the terms that I that just clicked for me. He was like, if you can only be happy for yourself, You’ve got pretty limited amount of happiness, right? I’m not saying this like I’m not trying to pull the whole life of suffering.
Eric Zimmer 00:54:29 It’s just, you know, you’re you’re one person. You can only have so many happiness. Yeah. If you can be happy for everyone, it’s unlimited. You have unlimited chances to experience positive moments.
Faith Salie 00:54:44 I love that there was a show. I didn’t see the show. Admittedly, I only saw this clip and I mentioned it in v enlightened. It’s called afterlife with Ricky Gervais and a Dame. Penelope Wilton has this line. She says to him, and she says, happiness is amazing. It’s so amazing that it doesn’t matter if it’s yours.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:07 Well, I don’t think we could end in a better place. It’s very, very beautiful. You and I are going to continue talking in a post-show conversation, which I’m looking forward to. We’re going to talk about you launching your book and the emotions that went with that, because I think it’s a great story about envy and success and all kinds of things mixed up together. Listeners, if you’d like access to that, as well as add free episodes.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:31 A special episode I do each week called a teaching song and a poem you can go to when you. Say thank you so much. This has really been a pleasure.
Faith Salie 00:55:42 Eric. Thank you. What a gift.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:44 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.
