Let’s talk about the sin no one wants to own up to: Envy.
Lust has its perks—it’s got poetry and perfume ads. Gluttony gets buffets, Julia Child, and half the Food Network. Pride is practically a motivational poster. Even wrath has a cinematic edge—people love a good revenge flick.
But envy? Envy is the weird cousin who lives in the crawlspace and eats lint. Envy is the goblin of the seven deadly sins. And nobody wants to admit they’re doing goblin cosplay in their soul.
I’ll go first. I envy pretty much everyone.
In my memoir, Easy Street: A Story of Redemption From Myself, I confess to envying everyone from “the tap-dancing triplets on The Wide World of Dance to finger-pickin’ folk musicians who play deep into the night to Krista Tippett, the spiritual doyenne of NPR.”
I envy. A lot.
And I’m not alone. Envy is our culture’s silent partner. We scroll social media and quietly compare. We see someone else’s good fortune—an award, a baby, a beach vacation—and feel a little sting, then a little shame about the sting. Nobody wants to admit it. But I think it’s time we did. It’s time we brought envy out of the basement.
What’s the antidote?
I found it—maybe—on my podcast Fifty Words for Snow, which I co-host with Emily John Garcés. We explore words from other languages that don’t exist in English but should. Words that name the stuff you feel in your bones but couldn’t say out loud. The ones that make you think, “Oh! That’s what that is.”
On our episode “Buddhist Blessings,” we spoke to the head teacher of the Zen Center of Los Angeles, Katherine “Senshin” Griffith, about a word I’d been dying to understand: mudita.
“It means empathetic joy,” Griffith told us. “The pleasure that comes from delighting in someone else’s well-being.”
Basically, the opposite of schadenfreude. Instead of secretly enjoying your enemy’s cringey downfall, you genuinely rejoice in someone else’s success. Even if you wanted that job. Even if their vacation pics make you want to throw your phone into the sea.
And then Emily gave the perfect example. Her husband was on a beach in Thailand, calling to tell her about the soft waves and the mangoes and whatever else people enjoy on exotic holidays. And Emily? Emily was back home, elbow-deep in dishwasher grime—scraping out the crusted gunk from a forgotten crevice.
That is the exact moment, Griffith said, that mudita is meant for.
Because it’s easy to be happy for someone when you’re on a beach with them. It’s Olympic-level spiritual fitness to feel joy for them while you’re disinfecting the silverware basket.
Griffith reminded us: “You don’t wait until it’s easy to practice mudita. You’re working a muscle. And the only way it gets stronger is by lifting something heavy—like your own envy.”
Mudita isn’t a nice idea—it’s a discipline. A daily practice. The spiritual equivalent of planking. You don’t do it because you already feel great. You do it because you don’t.
In Easy Street, I write about the illusion that someone else has it easy. That someone else is living your life better than you are. The joke, of course, is that my life has often looked easy, from the outside. But the book tells a different story. It’s about redemption, yes, but not from sin. From self. From the belief that the success or happiness of others somehow diminishes our own.
It doesn’t. And mudita is the proof.
We don’t have to wait for the scales to balance. We don’t have to wait until we feel like we’re winning to root for someone else. We can start now, exactly where we are. Whether we’re on a stage, off in the wings, or just elbow-deep in the dishwasher grime of daily life.
Because joy, like language, expands when shared.