You can’t open a magazine, or watch TV, without seeing beautiful, rich, perfect people that, no matter how “perfect” our lives are, seem to lead even more perfect ones.

The people that came up with the 7 Deadly Sins, an evolving classification of vices that were originally used in early Christian teachings, knew how important Envy is— sandwiching it between Wrath and Pride. Surely Envy is the one we are least likely to own up to because it typecasts us as ungenerous, mean, small-hearted, insecure and less than perfect ourselves.

I personally will admit to some of it if you will. Thanks.

Leave it to William Shakespeare to coin the phrase, in Othello. “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey'd monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on…”

Jealousy and Envy didn’t have studies like “The Psychology of Jealousy and Envy” to tell them apart in those days, so the phrase just stuck.  

Helmut Schoek, in his seminal tome on Envy, "A Theory of Social Behavior," notes that Envy, to qualify, must have a strong touch of malice behind it and manifests itself in three phases.

The first phase is basically benign and no fun at all, so we can skip to the second phase and get to the malice part. Like resenting the good fortune of another, and wishing your opponent lands in a sand trap or wishing your rival at work freezes in a meeting, or wishing someone you know loses his entire fortune in the stock market. (You’ll commiserate appropriately.)

Aeschylus, in 500 BC, probably got to the heart of it when he wrote: “It is in the character of very few men to honor without Envy a friend who has prospered.” Gore Vidal put it another way: “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”
  
If we own up to it at all, the second phase is as far as most of us go. If it graduates to the third phase, when you choose to help those wishes along, it could mean a longer phase away from home. And your trial splashed on Tru TV. Which will be a consolation to the people that had previously envied you.
   
Now that we can see where envy leads, there are a few things you can do to keep this feeling under control. Whenever it rears its ugly head, I usually think of some successful, beautiful people I’ve know that are not deliriously happy. And I do believe those who have everything in the world, sometimes, lose the capacity to enjoy what they have...“What, caviar, again?” And if the marriage seems a little boring after six months, no problem. There's another beautiful person out there.

Tell me what works for you; perhaps you'll provide some enviable answers.