Envy and jealousy
It is very important to distinguish between two rather close concepts - envy and jealousy. Both emotions cause us to resort to comparisons. Except that when we are jealous, we will imagine how someone feels good with my friend, my wife, or my husband, while when we are jealous, we will think about how someone feels good with their friend, their family, their possessions.
Jealousy is built on our conviction that we possess something (specific). And that something is being taken away from us.
And in envy, not only may we not have possessed the object of envy in the past, but we may not really need it in the present and in the future. We often just want to be in someone's shoes at the moment of their good, to feel what the other person who has several higher educations or a new house by the sea is experiencing.

So is there "white" envy and "black" envy?
The color in the definition of envy speaks to the degree of schadenfreude directed at the possessor of what we do not have. In the "black" version of envy, we want to insult, humiliate, lower the degree of their happiness, and bring them to the state we are in. The "white" version compares our own and someone else's, but at the same time there are no hostile feelings, in this case a person is able to adequately assess someone else's successes and instead of a humiliating position, improve his/her position. Such envy can awaken our competitive abilities.

But what then is the color of envy that does not entail anger and desire to humiliate another, but also does not motivate one's own development?
Living with Envy
Envy can be very uncomfortable, causing shame and despair. It interferes with building healthy relationships with people, family and work. Affects well-being. Negative experiences take a lot of energy, so often envious people are forced to resort to certain behaviors that supposedly save them from the corrosive envy.
Here are some of them:
- Avoidance.
To avoid feeling envy and anger toward someone who lives "better," a person may stop communicating with the person he or she envies, block him or her in all means of communication, and try to avoid going to places where he or she might meet.
- Humiliation
Humiliation of the merits and belittling of the importance of the other person's achievements. The envious person may resort to many sophisticated ways of explaining the insignificance of the achievements of a friend, colleague, neighbor.
- Causing envy of others
Sometimes a person deliberately begins to communicate with people who, in his opinion, are lower than him in some respects and (again, in his opinion) should envy him. In this way he tries to compensate for his negative emotions.
- Revenge
Actions of revenge can be so well disguised that it is sometimes very difficult to see them in others and in ourselves. We may purposely spend time with someone we envy so that we can mock them more often in front of others.
How do we get rid of envy?
It is important to work with envy. Remembering, however, that despite all its poison, there is a great benefit in it: envy helps us to understand what we are missing.

Here are simple steps for dealing with envy in the here and now:
1. Write down everything you envy. Complete the list as new feelings or situations arise in which you felt envy.
2. Take the first item. Let's say it's, "I envy my friend because he found his thing in life, does what he loves every day, and gets paid for it."
3. Reflect on what your friend has done to be in this position. If this person is close to you, you are likely to know the details of his biography. But do not forget that a sincere heart-to-heart talk can help reveal unknown facts. Possible outcomes of reflection: either your friend has studied a lot, worked hard and now he has received a well-deserved. Or he is not in such a situation at all, as it seems to you, but he is not satisfied with his situation, and you invented his whole success story, idealizing the life of others.
4. Rewrite the sentence as follows: "I'm on my way to find my own thing in life, to do what I love every day, and to get money for it.
5. And then work on a plan to achieve that goal. Most likely, the first order of business on the big journey toward wholeness and fulfillment will be to find the answer to the question: what do I really want?