Envy helped me thrive in my career, marriage and parenting

Stuck in a male-dominated Korean culture, I grew up with envy. My earliest memory was waking up in my family’s Chicago apartment to find the living room jampacked with blue baby shower presents. Not only was I not invited to the party, but my unborn brother gained more possessions in one evening than I owned in the first six years of my life before he arrived.

Four years later, when I was 10, we moved to Seoul. There, at school, my biggest lesson was adjusting to a culture where, as a girl, I felt I had no status. This was during the late 1970s and the idea of virtuous women, or yeolnyeo, who first served fathers, husbands and then sons, was pretty firmly in place. I knew it was unjust, but mostly I was envious of boys, especially my brother, Roger, who had unseated me as the favored child. If that wasn’t enough, my father was a professor of Christian ethics and a minister, and so I knew envy was a vice. On top of everything else, I was a sinner, too.

Yet jealousy helped me thrive in my career, marriage and parenting. And as a certified life coach in New York for the last 15 years, I’ve helped many clients turn the destructive side of envy into an instrument for good, as a motivator to persist even when life feels unfair.

Envy gets a bad rap. When I bring it up in casual conversations outside of work, most friends deny experiencing the emotion, even if they just badmouthed a mutual acquaintance with some undeserved good fortune. In Korea, status comparisons are openly discussed. You see threads of both admiration and disdain for the elite in every K-drama or film — from the 2019-2020 television series “Crash Landing on You” to the 2020 Oscar-winning movie “Parasite.”

I wondered whether my background made me preoccupied with what seemed to be the last taboo: In the United States, we openly discuss politics, sex and religion, yet feelings of envy remain unexplored.

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“How you experience envy correlates to how you respond to competition,” said Princeton University psychology professor Susan Fiske, author of the book “Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us.” “If somebody is a little above you, and they’re your ally or mentor, then benign envy is when you say, ‘You have something I want, I’m going to learn how you’re doing it and imitate you.’ If the person is too far above you, like the Queen of England, then forget it. ... But, if they’re just a bit above you, and you think you deserve it and they don’t, that’s toxic envy.”

“Envy is about status. Jealousy is a threat to a valued primary relationship,” says psychologist Robert Leahy, director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy. In his therapy practice, “it’s pervasive. People avoid other people. Friendships and family relationships are affected. Generally, it’s people who are aspirational, during their 20s through 40s, trying to advance.”

This helps explain why so many of my high-achieving clients ruminated about close colleagues who worked faster or received more interesting assignments. But they rarely mentioned heads of their organizations or competitors outside their organization.

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I was a classic case. Growing up, my father groomed my baby brother to become a doctor while expecting little of me. My mother scolded me in childhood for not finishing the crusts of my sandwiches while dutifully chopping them off upon Roger’s request. I loved them and ached for them to adore me as they did him.

It didn’t help that I was not alone. Middle school girls back then were taught how to iron a man’s shirt and use an abacus to manage household expenses. Meanwhile, boys seem to mostly get away with snapping back our bra straps and flicking up the edge of our skirts. To this day, I can’t sit in a dress without making sure I sit on its bottom edges.

I was also ashamed of resenting my sibling. He was my sole comrade in the upheaving move from the United States to Korea and for the six years we lived there, until at 16 I went to live with my aunt in Los Angeles.

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New York Episcopal Bishop Allen Shin, who is Korean American, reassured me that merely having a negative feeling was not a sin. “It’s natural. We can’t control it. How you use it, express it, and act upon it ... that’s what matters.”

He also agreed that growing up in a traditional Korean family likely made me more susceptible. “Korean culture is such a rigid, patriarchal, Confucian culture. The girl must sacrifice for the boys. So yes, a daughter feels envious of her brother. It can be suffocating, needing to do to honor for the family while suppressing individuality.”

“Rather than deny your envy, you have to acknowledge and accept how you feel,” adding that both the Buddhist tradition of mindful contemplation and the Christian tradition of spiritual detachment can be helpful.

Without such awareness, however, my juvenile fantasy of winning back my parents’ affection turned into a great motivator in my life. To prove I was worthy, I pushed myself to graduate school. I struggled until one day I realized that if I didn’t finish my dissertation soon, my brother could become a “doctor” before me. I earned my PhD in education policy and leadership a month before he got his MD — only to discover my parents’ views did not change. And, despite landing a coveted postdoc position at Columbia University, I was miserable. Climbing the academic ladder required publishing journal articles I didn’t enjoy reading, let alone writing.

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I finally came to realize that “if you consider people struggling with status — trying to gain it, keep it, undermine others from having it, there’s no end,” as Leahy put it.

He recommends searching for meaning and devised the “negation technique”: “Imagine you’ve lost everything, your body, memories, possessions, and family. Then, add back one thing at a time, but only if you can prove you appreciate it.”

Knowing this technique could have saved me years of struggle. Envy motivated me to get technical skills, an advanced degree and a good job, providing me with public success. But to make my life fulfilling, I needed to look beyond outward status markers and dig inward. I need to figure out what I truly wanted. Envy, oddly, helped me again, but it did even more.

While I loved being the primary caregiver for my children, it irked me that mothers tended to struggle with their careers in a way that many fathers did not. I was also envious of entrepreneurs and writers. Watching them — and, yes, I suppose envying them — made me decide to start my own life coach practice, helping women figure out how to balance careers and family, and taking writing classes whenever I could.

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As Fiske describes in her book, envy is also “a moral emotion” and often “entails feelings of injustice.” For me, that meant a path to a profession that aimed to rectify the unfairness similar to what I had experienced or witnessed. In doing so, I gained a sense of purpose, doing work that deeply mattered to me, guiding young ambitious women to navigate some of the shoals I had.

Harnessing the power of envy was a tool I shared — figuring out how to use it as both compass and engine to a desired career or life, without it becoming toxic. Clients learned to emulate, seek advice and sometimes even collaborate with those they once envied to find something more rewarding

Twenty-three years since we got our degrees, my brother and I are closer. We have commiserated about the burdens of cultural expectations on each of us. He sees the weight of elder care responsibilities on me (including caregivers now who save all their questions and needs for my visits) and I the pressures to advance on him. These days we take turns traveling back to Seoul to care for our frail father and our mother with late-stage Alzheimer’s.

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On one of those recent trips, while tidying my parents’ cluttered apartment, I discovered copies of recent essays I’d written tucked in my father’s desk. I found notebooks in which my mother had copied and translated into Korean sections of articles I had written how I had once despised Korea for its stifling sexism. Reading those translations in the margins, I suspected my words resonated with her, too, even as her memory and handwriting faltered.

And I wondered if coming to terms with my own feelings of envy, and then using them to finally get to a place that was important to me, had helped them finally see me, too.

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