4 Signs Your Envy is Driven By Feeling You’re Too Late

Your envy is a good teacher, listen, then change your story

And it’s all around us, so the opportunity exists to learn constantly from such a corrosive emotion.

The endless comparison to the perfect curated lives of influencers. Like pining after the lives of people in cigarette ads, or movies before the shit hits the fan.

The simple answer is your envy shows you what you want.

But if your envy follows a particular pattern it could be driven by time anxiety in stealth mode. In this case, past time anxiety, the feeling that you’re falling behind. That you’ve not achieved as much as you should have by now.

1. Successful People Younger Than You Annoy You Especially a skill you’re grinding. You resent them being there ahead of you, having started earlier or made progress faster than you.

2. You Make Excuses For Their Success They’ve fewer responsibilities or it’s easier when you’re young. They can burn the candle at both ends without the gears of their lives grinding to a halt like arthritic bone.

3. You Discount Their Efforts Ascribing their successes to luck, privilege, talent, or genius. All things you fear you don’t have. Even if you deep down you know, these edges don’t shortcut the work that must be done.

4. You Can’t Get Them Out of Your Mind You spend more time than you should trying to copy their path. You assume they’ve lucked onto the perfect one. And you want to steal it right from under their feet.

None of this is healthy.

Comparing and coveting what others have is a deeply corroding habit, that has to be flipped around.

Write down everything you envy

1. Now you have a list of everything you don’t have but wish you did.
2. Some of this will be outside of your control
3. The parts that are within your control will take hard work and patience
4. Now shift to look at what you do have
5. Then in your mind create a person one or more steps behind you who wish they had what you have. Who wishes they were given your advantages.
6. Shift your perspective. You could help that person. You can flip to generosity, not envy.

There’s always someone richer, stronger, faster, younger. Whatever, it’s not important. There’s also always someone poorer, weaker, slower, older who you could help if you wanted to.

Now you’ve flipped the story around. You’ve gone from plotting villain to hero. Now go do some good.

Key Takeaway:

Mine your envy to learn what matters to you, but ditch the feeling you’re hard done by, because that mindset is tripping you up.