Jealousy

A Snapchat feature lets paying users see their position in their friends’ digital orbits. For some teens, whose friends are everything, it’s adding to their anxiety.

Snapchat+ subscribers can check where they rank with a particular friend based on how often that friend communicates with them. The result is automatically rendered in a solar-system metaphor: Are you Mercury, the planet closest to your friend? Great! Uranus? Bad sign.

“A lot of kids my age have trouble differentiating best friends on Snapchat from actual best friends in real life,” says 15-year-old Callie Schietinger. She said she had her own problems when a boyfriend noticed that he was Neptune in her solar system. He asked who held the Mercury position and when she told him it was a guy friend, he got mad.

More than 20 million U.S. teens use the app, though most don’t pay for Snapchat+. Young adults with those paid accounts have seen friendships splinter and young love wither due to the knowledge that someone else ranks higher on the app. Now, lawmakers, doctors, and parents are giving fuller attention to these apps and how they broadly affect kids’ mental health.

Callie and her boyfriend have since broken up, for other reasons. But that stress and the misunderstandings she has seen other friends experience have soured her on the feature. “It’s everyone’s biggest fear put onto an app,” Callie says. “Ranking is never good for anyone’s head.”

William Muir, a researcher at Purdue University, studies the productivity of chickens. He wants to know how to breed chickens that lay lots of eggs and create environments that foster greater productivity. To research how to make super chickens, he did an experiment.

Muir put chickens into two groups. One group contained normal, healthy chickens. He left them alone for six generations of a chicken’s life. Another, separate group included all the super chickens, those who are proven high producing egg layers. Muir also left them alone for six generations. He provided food, water, and a clean environment, but did nothing to influence the chickens egg laying.

At the end of the experiment, Muir discovered that the group of normal chickens were flourishing: they were laying more eggs per chicken than when the experiment started. In the group of super chickens, only three were left. They had pecked the others to death. The super chickens had laid more eggs through a strategy of suppressing other chickens’ productivity, by killing, or intimidating them, so they were unable to lay eggs.

Possible Preaching Angle

Competition; Leadership; Success - Leadership can fall into the same trap. We believe that if we find the right super chickens we will have success. We look for superstars. In our culture, and in our churches, we often create super chickens, because we desperately want success. We think it can come through one superstar leader.

A research study examined data from millions of plane flights to determine possible indicators for incidents of air rage—when passengers become unruly or violent in some way. The study found that flights that have a first class or business class cabin and a separate economy class section are more likely to report incidents of air rage than flights with only one class of seats.

The study also showed that when flights board from the rear of the aircraft, rather than inviting first class passengers aboard first, there were fewer incidences of unruly behavior. When people walk past passengers in the first class or business class cabin and see them swilling champagne and eating caviar, they feel as if they have been treated unequally and unjustly.

The envy and jealousy make passengers more prone to feel justified losing control and acting rudely or violently.

Mara Reinstein writes in Parade Magazine:

We met Steve Martin years ago as a banjo-playing comic with an arrow through his head singing "King Tut." He's now a movie star and serious musician as well. In an interview, he recalled the movie "Father of the Bride" beating every other movie at the box office and thinking, "Oh, this month it's my turn."

The interviewer followed-up, "Does it hurt when it's not your turn?" Steve answered, "Not anymore … you have to remember that there's always going to be somebody better than you and there's room for everybody. I'm also a musician … I work with a lot of bands. I always say, 'Don't be jealous of other bands. You're just going to eat yourself up and waste time and it will get you nowhere. So be inclusive and say, ‘Great job.’ It takes a while to learn to not take it all so seriously."

Possible Preaching Angle:

The world may not call jealousy and envy "sins" but it recognizes they create issues. He's right, isn't he? It does take a while to learn to let others be praised.

By most measures, Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift are remarkable women. Intelligent and capable …. Both are the kind of mega pop stars who inspire convulsions of adulation and tears. They’re graced with a radiance that seems almost exclusive to celebrities, with skin so incandescent it needs no filter.

But they are not perfect. Nor do they pretend to be. A recent Apple TV+ documentary, Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me, offers an unsparing portrait of Gomez, now 30, and her experiences with bipolar disorder, lupus, anxiety, and psychosis. On her latest album, Midnights, Taylor Swift, now 32, sings about her depression working the graveyard shift, about ending up in crisis. In her song “Anti-Hero” she sings, “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me ... Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby / And I’m a monster.”

This combination of external flawlessness and emotional vulnerability feels like a feature particular to contemporary female pop stardom. On one screen we see impeccable glam, expertly choreographed and costumed performances and startling displays of luxury. On the other screen, admissions of anxiety, PTSD, panic attacks, and sleeplessness.

For today’s teens, imagine that same relentless scrutiny—if not in quite the same proportions—and self-doubt. In the recent book Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing, Emily Weinstein and Carrie James document what they call “Comparison Quicksand.” They quote girls saying things such as, “On social media everyone seems like they are far better and far ahead than me, which is stressful and makes me feel behind, unwanted and stupid.” And: “I scroll through my Instagram and see models with perfect bodies and I feel horrible about myself.” For teenagers who are susceptible to insecurity, Weinstein and James write, “going on social media can activate the ‘dark spiral.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In our society, social media and the news elevates celebrities to become role models that are impossible to emulate. Parents and mentors should realize this and help orient our young people to scriptural maturity. Each one of them is a unique creation with gifts and abilities which they can celebrate and humbly use to serve others.

The Atlantic ran an article that calls attention to the fact that American homes are a lot bigger than they used to be. In 1973, when the Census Bureau started tracking home sizes, the median size of a newly built house was just over 1,500 square feet; that figure reached nearly 2,500 square feet in 2015.

This rise, combined with a drop in the average number of people per household, has translated to a whole lot more room for homeowners and their families. By one estimate, each newly built house had an average of 507 square feet per resident in 1973, and nearly twice that—971 square feet—four decades later.

But Americans aren’t getting any happier with their ever-bigger homes. Clement Bellet, at a European business school, wrote “Despite a major upscaling of single-family houses since 1980 house satisfaction has remained steady in American suburbs.”

It’s a classic, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses type report about how we Americans are building bigger homes than ever—and yet our happiness tends to be inversely proportionate to the square footage of our new real estate. As usual, the dynamics of comparison, judgment, and self-justification are at play.

Bellet continues:

To be clear, having more space does generally lead to people saying they’re more pleased with their home. The problem is that the satisfaction often doesn’t last if even bigger homes pop up nearby. If I bought a house to feel like I’m “the king of my neighborhood,” but a new king arises, it makes me feel very bad about my house. It is an unfulfilling cycle of one-upmanship.

In his book, Chuck Bentley writes:

There's a name for God that we seldom ever use. I know I don't use it very often. That name is Jealous. Sounds strange, doesn't it? When we call someone jealous, it’s usually to point out a character flaw. How can something we consider bad be attributed to God, especially one of his names? “Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is jealous, is a jealous God” (Exodus 34:14).

Back in the late 1960s, there was a popular TV western series called The Guns of Will Sonnet. Walter Brennan played the title role, a Scripture-quoting man with a reputation for unparalleled gun fighting skills. As the series progressed, viewers saw the wise old man avoid more gunfights than he got into the simple, truthful statement about his abilities: “No brag, just fact.”

God has the title of Jealous because he’s the only one worthy of all our affection and adoration. No brag, just fact. The complete worthiness of ultimate praise grants him and him alone the right to be the Jealous One. He’s God Almighty. He’s at the top of all Kings, all Lords, all gods, and all things. So jealousy is normative, if you’re God.

Headlines rocketed through social media after billionaire Robert F. Smith made an unprecedented announcement during his commencement speech in front of the Morehouse College graduating class of 2019. "My family is going to create a grant to eliminate your student loans," Smith told the senior class. "You great Morehouse men are bound only by the limits of your own conviction and creativity."

The momentous announcement generated plenty of buzz for the historically black, all male college. Plenty of jokes and memes predictably followed. (“’Are you free this time next year?’ asked the Class of 2020.”)

However, an undercurrent of resentment has been stirred up among other African Americans who saved and sacrificed in order to pay for their children’s college education. Michelle Singletary, a personal finance columnist for The Washington Post, explains:

There’s a common complaint I hear from some parents who have sacrificed and saved for their children to attend college debt-free … Was my labor in vain? Those not on the receiving end of this amazing gift might have thought to themselves, even for just a second: “What about us? What do we get for doing the right thing and saving for our kids to go to college debt-free?”

Still, Singletary has encouraging words for those who did it the hard way.

Your saving and sacrificing doesn’t make you a … loser. It makes you responsible and fortunate. There’s so much reward in living within your means, including setting a good example for your children. Whether it’s a surprise gift from a billionaire or need-based aid given to some other’s person’s child, don’t resent what others get.

Potential Preaching Angles: God’s generosity should not be confused with our human instinct for fairness or equivalence, because God’s extravagant love and grace know no bounds. We miss the mark when we devalue God’s generosity by arguing about fairness.

In 2018, Harvard Business School undertook a first-of-it's-kind study of over 4000 millionaires in the United States asking them about how much money it would take to make them happy. Each millionaire was asked to report how much they currently had. How happy they were on a scale of 1-10. And then how much money they thought they would need to get to a "10" on the happiness scale. Shockingly, 26%, the largest response was assigned to "10x more," the largest possible option given. 24% chose "5x more" followed by 23% at "2x mores." Only 13% of respondents said they "currently have enough to be happy."

Perhaps most surprising of all, this answer was consistent no matter how much money a person had. This means that someone with 100 million was just as likely as the person with 10 million to select they needed "10x" the amount of money they had to be truly happy. In an interview with The Atlantic, lead researcher Michael Norton suggested that the problem for so many millionaires is comparison. So the question of happiness is not so much "Do I have enough?" but "Do I have more than those around me?"

Norton concluded, "If a family amasses $50 million dollars but moves into a neighborhood where everyone has more money, they still won't be happy. All the way up the spectrum of wealth, basically everyone says [they’d need] two or three times as much to be perfectly happy."

Spurned by family members who left him out of an event, an Oregon man got his revenge in a most public, disruptive fashion.

Sonny Donnie Smith, 38, was sentenced to three years of probation after he dialed in a terrorist threat that implicated his father and brother, who were both traveling through airports. He placed two anonymous phone calls to McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, and Midland International Air and Space Port, in Midland, Texas.

Smith's father and brother were detained and questioned as part of an investigation, which eventually yielded no evidence of terrorist activity. The temporary detention caused Smith's brother to miss his flight.

US District Judge Anna Brown was reserved in her words to Smith: "I hope you appreciate what you did really did disrupt not just your family but the whole system,'' Brown said.

Smith was tearful and apologetic as he stood before the court, and his attorney Todd Bofferding requested that his sentence not include community service, because Smith's emotional needs were so pressing. Bofferding claimed his client suffers from high levels of anxiety and has been prescribed anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic medication.

As if to confirm his counsel's advocacy, Smith burst into tears at the conclusion of the hearing.

Potential Preaching Angles: Jealousy can turn into immorality under the guise of pranking. When family members turn against each other, it's a sign of impending destruction. If we can't love our family members, it's difficult to love God.

In his book Being Nixon: A Man Divided, author Evan Thomas recalls the occasion when then President Richard Nixon received word that former president Dwight Eisenhower had died. Eisenhower had asked Nixon to deliver his eulogy. Thomas writes:

Sitting by the fire on a cold early spring evening, Nixon began to muse to his speechwriter, Ray Price, about one particular quality that set Eisenhower apart. "Everybody loved Ike," Nixon said, not a little enviously. "But the reverse of that was that Ike loved everybody." Nixon went on: "He never hated his critics, not even the press. He'd just say, 'I'm a little puzzled by those fellows.'"

Price could picture Nixon's mind working, catching himself. Nixon knew that what he had said was not quite true. It was too much to believe that Ike never felt anger. The difference was that, after a blowup, the anger passed, while Nixon let it fester. At some level, Nixon might have wished to emulate Eisenhower. But he couldn't. Possibly, he did not want to; resentment, though toxic, was vital to Nixon.

Through a Rotary Club sponsored program, Clayton Lush had built schools at villages in the Solomon Islands. He also hosted a Christmas carols show for the community, gave money to spina-bifida research. He also excelled as a rugby player. Lush, the father of two, also had a carpentry business and was the host of the Australian TV show Building Ideas. However, Lush's downfall would be sealed by the most common of the seven deadly sins: jealousy.

Lush, 41, was among 16 South Australians involved in a four-year, $40 million cannabis syndicate. Lush's lawyer told the court his client was working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and became envious when he did costly renovation work on the home of Storm Alexander Strang, the ring leader of the operation.

"It became apparent to Mr. Lush that Mr. Strang was involved in activities which perhaps could be unlawful, but he did not know what they were as he was looking at the lifestyle, he was looking at the fact Mr. Strang never appeared to work (and) seemed to have an awful lot of money to spend on the kind of activity at his home."

Research studies indicate that up to 45 percent of adult siblings have relationships marked by rivalry or distance. A story from the Wall Street Journal featured Al Golden, 85, who still chokes up when he talks about his twin brother, Elliott, who died three years ago. The brothers shared a room growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., graduated from the same college and then married within a month of each other in 1947.

Yet Mr. Golden still remembers how their father often compared their grades, asking one or the other, "How come you got a B and your brother got an A?" Elliott Golden became a lawyer and eventually a state Supreme Court judge. Al Golden went into the mirror business then sold life insurance. He says he always envied his brother's status and secretly took pleasure in knowing he was a better fisherman and owned a big boat. Once, Elliott asked him, "I am a lawyer. How come you make more money than me?" Mr. Golden says. "He meant: 'How come you are making more than me when you are not as successful?' But it made me feel good."

One day, Elliott accused him of not doing enough to take care of their ailing mother. After the conversation, Al didn't speak to his brother for more than a year. "It might have been the built-up of jealousies over the years," he says. His brother repeatedly reached out to him, as did his nieces and nephews, but Mr. Golden ignored them.

Then one day Al received an email from his brother telling a story about two men who had a stream dividing their properties. One man hired a carpenter to build a fence along the stream, but the carpenter built a bridge by mistake. Mr. Golden thought about the email then wrote back, "I'd like to walk over the bridge." "I missed him," Mr. Golden says now. "I never had the chance to miss him before."

Henry Varley is best known as the man who stated to Dwight Moody, "The world has yet to see what God will do with a man who is fully committed to him." Moody sought to be that man and went on to become the world's most prominent evangelist of his day.

What is not so well known about Varley is that he was himself a powerful evangelist and pastor. But he faced a pitch battle with jealousy when another preacher in his neighborhood began having great success and started drawing some of Varley's members. Varley felt deep resentment toward the other minister and later divulged:

I shall never forget the sense of guilt and sin that possessed me over that business. I was miserable. Was I practically saying to the Lord Jesus, "Unless the prosperity of [your] church and people comes in this neighborhood by me, success had better not come"? Was I really showing inability to rejoice in another worker's service? I felt that it was a sin of a very hateful character. I never asked the Lord to take away my life either before or since, but I did then, unless his grace would give me victory over this foul image of jealousy.

The world-class actor Mark Wahlberg, a committed father, husband and church-attender, is a rare celebrity who advocates humility. In a (2014) interview, Wahlberg said:

I can't do things that some other actors can do, and they probably can't do some of the stuff that I can do … So for me, I don't really care if Christian Bale or Matt Damon or whoever gets to shine brighter than me in a movie. I'm there to serve the big picture; to do what I can do better than anyone else. That's what I can live with. Those are the choices I make.

The essayist Joseph Epstein writes, "Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all."

There's plenty of research to back up Epstein's statement. Psychologists have found that envy decreases life satisfaction and depresses well-being. Envy is positively correlated with depression and neuroticism, and the hostility it breeds may actually make us sick. Studies suggests that envy can help explain our complicated relationship with social media: it often leads to destructive "social comparison," which decreases happiness.

Epstein goes on to say that envy makes us look "ungenerous, mean, [and] small-hearted." No wonder nobody wants to own up to this unhappy sin!

Do you have an uneasy and sometimes all-consuming fear that others are doing something or experiencing something that you're not? If so, you may be suffering from a form of social anxiety called "FOMO," or the Fear of Missing Out. The term, first identified by marketers in the mid-'90s, refers to the sometimes energizing, sometimes terrifying anxiety that you are missing out on something absolutely terrific. It could be a party, a new movie, a special relationship (a spouse, a child, a friend, or a grandchild), or a delicious romantic dinner.

FOMO is an age-old problem that has accelerated thanks to real-time digital-updates and the smartphone. Social media expert Marc A. Smith explained it this way: "Those who used to dine behind thick stone walls and had caviar now do so, Tweet about it, and can be seen by those sitting down to dinner at Chipotle's." In The New York Times Jenna Wortham wrote about a friend who works in advertising who told her that she felt fine about her life—until she opened Facebook. The friend said, "Then I'm thinking, I am 28, with three roommates, and, oh, it looks like they have a precious baby and a mortgage. And then I [wanted to] die." Wortham claims that social media updates can make our simple domestic pleasures pale in comparison with all the fun things we could or should be doing.

On December 2, 2012, a Spanish long-distance runner named Ivan Fernandez Anaya was competing in a cross-country race in the Spanish countryside. Anaya was running in second-place, well behind the race leader, the Kenyan runner and Olympic medalist Abel Mutai. As they entered the finishing stretch, Mutai, the certain winner of the race, suddenly stopped running. Apparently, he mistakenly thought he had already crossed the finish line.

A Spanish newspaper reported what happened next: "Fernández Anaya quickly caught up with him, but instead of exploiting Mutai's mistake to speed past and claim an unlikely victory, he stayed behind and, using gestures, guided the Kenyan to the line and let him cross first."

When asked what motivated this kind deed, Anaya said, "He was the rightful winner. He created a gap that I couldn't have closed if he hadn't made a mistake. As soon as I saw he was stopping, I knew I wasn't going to pass him."

Surprisingly, Anaya's coach, the famous Spanish runner Martin Fiz, was disappointed with Anaya's display of sportsmanship. Fiz said, "He has wasted an occasion. Winning always makes you more of an athlete. You have to go out to win."

But Anaya stood by his decision. He told reporters,

Even if they had told me that winning would have earned me a place in the Spanish team for the European championships, I wouldn't have done it either … because today, with the way things are in all circles, in soccer, in society, in politics, where it seems anything goes, a gesture of honesty goes down well.

On October 14, 2012, the Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner broke two world records that had stood for over fifty years. He smashed the previous world record for the fastest dive, breaking the sound barrier and reaching a velocity of nearly 834 miles per hour. He also broke the world record for the highest freefall, jumping out of a balloon 128,000 feet (or 24 miles) above New Mexico.

But the 43-year-old Baumgartner gladly admits that he couldn't have done it without the help of his mentor—the previous world record holder for both records, 84-year-old Joe Kittinger. Kittinger, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, has been an integral part of Baumgartner's team. Months prior to Baumgartner's record-breaking dive, Kittinger provided him with advice and encouragement whenever the younger man doubted his ability. Right before the actual jump, Kittinger told Baumgartner, "All right, step up to the exterior step. Start the cameras. And our guardian angel will take care of you now." During the fall, Kittinger's reassuring voice from mission control guided Baumgartner throughout the dive, especially during one particularly tense moment. Early in the dive, Baumgartner started spinning out of control—the same problem that had nearly killed Kittinger during his dive. Baumgartner kept talking to Kittinger, whose deep voice offered reassurance. In fact, Baumgartner didn't allow any other voice than Kittinger's in his helmet.

When the dive was finished, Kittinger had only praise for Baumgartner's new world records. Kittinger said, "Felix did a great job, and it was a great honor to work with this brave guy."

An article in National Geographic highlighted the special bond between the two men. Prior to the jump, Kittinger said, "I'll be the only one who knows how Felix feels at that moment when he jumps from that step, 'cause I've done it."

Baumgartner agreed: "[Joe] knows how lonely you are at that altitude." Then he added, "It feels like, if Joe's there, nothing can go wrong."

Why do we enjoy watching others—especially rich, powerful, famous people—"fall from grace"? Joseph Epstein commented on our need to know and discuss stories about prominent people who have failed:

How delightful to those of us living out our modest lives, to witness, if only through the media, such ego-filled balloons getting popped .… When we see someone mightier than we divested of his dignity, stripped of his pretentions, humiliated in public, we feel comforted by having retained our own dignity, pretensions, good name. Perhaps after all, we conclude, it is just as well that we are not so rich, powerful, beautiful, talented. Relishing in others humiliations is good for our ego …. Even when we know deep down that if [our local newspaper] knew everything about us, we might be on the cover too.