In an era shaped by social media, widening inequality, and constant exposure to other people’s relationships, wealth, and success, jealousy has become one of the defining but least honestly discussed emotions of adulthood. We are encouraged to present ourselves as self-assured and above comparison, while privately measuring our lives against everyone around us.
There is also an important distinction between jealousy and envy, two emotions often used interchangeably but fundamentally different. Psychotherapist Jack Worthy points to the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who described envy as the desire to spoil or destroy what someone else has because the pain of lacking it feels unbearable. Jealousy, by contrast, is rooted in fear, longing, and comparison. Envy says: you have what I want, and I resent you for it. Jealousy says: I want what you have, too.
I have been jealous of friends whose parents regularly pay their rent or buy them apartments. I have also had friends admit they were jealous of my career and the perks that come with being a journalist: press trips abroad, invitations to Michelin-starred restaurants, and the appearance of a glamorous life.
A few years ago, I remember feeling a sharp sense of jealousy when a man I was dating casually told me he had no childhood trauma. His parents had him later in life, when they were emotionally mature, financially stable, and fully available to him. My upbringing could not have been more different.
“Humans are comparing creatures. We cannot help but compare ourselves to one another,” Worthy tells me. However, we have some agency as to what we use as the basis for those comparisons.
To be sure, comparison has become almost impossible to escape. Social media has created a culture in which we are constantly exposed to curated evidence of other people’s success: engagements, babies, promotions, apartments, weddings, vacations, and friend groups that seem effortlessly intact. At the same time, widening class divides mean many of those milestones genuinely are becoming less attainable for large numbers of people.
This feeling is surprisingly common. In 2024, a survey of 2,000 Americans found that 87% said they experience jealousy in relationships. Social media plays a big part; 55% of respondents noted that they feel jealous when their partner likes photos of attractive peers.
“When we as a culture treat jealousy and envy as unhealthy, I think we’re trying to steer people away from emotions that make us miserable, and towards an attitude defined more by gratitude,” Worthy said.
In some ways, I have become closer to friends who are honest about their jealousy. A text saying, “Omg so jealous of your ski trip while I am stuck in the office in rainy grey London,” creates more intimacy than forced positivity ever does.
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Jealousy can reveal our unmet needs, our ambitions, our loneliness, and the lives we still hope might be possible for us. Suppressed, it curdles into resentment and performance. Acknowledged honestly, it can become self-knowledge.
Pretending we are above comparison has not made us kinder or more emotionally evolved. It has only made us less honest about what it means to be human.
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