Who do you envy, what makes you do it and why?
The Envy Across Adulthood: The What and Who has found, not-so-remarkably, that what we envy changes as we age. In our 20s it’s physical appearance, social, romantic and scholastic success and we tend to envy those within five years of our age, whereas by our 40s it’s money, job status and family and we envy 23-year-olds for driving around in small cars that don’t fit families and being able to Netflix binge.
Watch Julia Roberts get her envy on in the scene from My Best Friend’s Wedding below. Post continues after video.
What the study also found was that women envy other women at a greater rate than men envy men. We swear this is proper research and not two guys scouring Instagram and Facebook accounts during Minecraft breaks on a Saturday night.
“Same-gender envy,” the study found. “Was more pronounced in women than in men.”
While what we envied changed over the decades, the who did not, with researchers being unable to “find support for the idea that women particularly envy the privileges of men.”
Say what? Women don’t envy the “privileges of men”? Okay, maybe it’s not envy. Maybe it’s frustration, exhaustion, disbelief, sadness, anger … did we say exhaustion?