Why Do We Envy Other People's Faith?

Envy is not always a sin to be crushed. Sometimes it is information. The quiet work is learning to tell the difference.

The Short Answer

There is a woman in your community whose faith looks effortless.

She lost something terrible and she did not shatter. She says the words and they seem to mean something when she says them. When the news is bad, she goes quiet and steady in a way you have never once managed. And when you watch her, you feel something that is not admiration, or not only admiration, and it does not have a name you want to say out loud.

The philosopher Hennie Kroesbergen gave it one. He calls it faith envy: a mixed longing for the security, certainty, and meaning that faith appears to give other people, running alongside a quiet resistance to the very form of life that seems to produce it (Kroesbergen, 2020).

Here is the direct answer. You are almost certainly not envying her doctrine. What gets envied in faith is the steadiness, the anchoring, the sense of being safe under suffering (Kroesbergen, 2020). And that is worth knowing, because envy has a diagnostic function. It points at what you actually want, which is often quite different from what you have been telling yourself you want (Crusius et al., 2019; Van de Ven, 2017).

But envy also lies, and it lies in a specific way. It manufactures a lack you did not have before you looked. Envy begins when someone else's advantage becomes self-relevant, which means it works by letting another person's measure become your measure (Boecker et al., 2022; Duffy et al., 2012). The pain is real. The deficit may not be.

So the question is not whether to feel this. You mostly do not get a vote on that. The question is what to do with it once it arrives, and the research is far less bleak on that point than most religious commentary about envy would lead you to expect.

Key Takeaways

• Faith envy targets certainty and steadiness, not doctrine, which makes it useful information about what you actually long for (Kroesbergen, 2020).

• Envy splits into two kinds: benign envy pushes you to level up, malicious envy pushes you to pull the other person down (Lange & Crusius, 2015; Van de Ven et al., 2009).

• Benign envy only motivates when the good looks attainable and within your control. When it looks unreachable, motivation collapses (Van de Ven et al., 2011a).

• Envy is not harmless. In a longitudinal study of roughly 18,000 adults, higher envy predicted worse mental health and slower growth in well-being later on (Mujcic & Oswald, 2018).

• Contentment is not the absence of desire. It is desire reclaimed from comparison and made answerable to goods you can actually endorse (Brunning, 2024; Crusius et al., 2020).

What Are We Actually Envying?

Not the ritual. Almost never the ritual.

Kroesbergen (2020) locates the object of faith envy in something quite specific: absolute certainty. The sense that life is meaningful. The sense of knowing what to do. The sense of being finally, ultimately safe in God's hands. What people describe wanting is trust strong enough to survive dark seasons, grief, and death itself.

Notice that none of those are practices. They are states.

This matters because people mistranslate the feeling almost immediately. They convert it into a project. "I need to learn more." "I need to daven better." "I should take the class." Sometimes true. But learning is a strategy for acquiring knowledge, and what the person actually wants is a nervous system that does not come apart at three in the morning. Those are different orders of problem, and one will not reliably solve the other.

The wider envy literature says the same thing in secular language. We usually covet not the object itself but the status, meaning, control, or security attached to it (Liu et al., 2024; Van de Ven, 2017; Crusius & Mussweiler, 2012). The handbag is not the point. The handbag is a delivery mechanism for something the person has not named yet. Faith envy runs on the same architecture, which is why it is so instructive when you slow down enough to read it.

And it happens inside faith, not only at its edges. Kroesbergen (2020) notes that non-believers describe frustration at having nothing to lean on, while believers envy people whose faith seems steadier, simpler, or more practice-shaped than their own. The woman in the row behind you, the one you are watching with that complicated feeling in your chest, is very possibly watching someone else with exactly the same feeling.

The gap you are experiencing is not the gap between the faithful and the faithless. It runs down the middle of nearly every religious life, including the ones that look seamless from where you sit.

Why Does the Longing Come With Contempt?

This is the strange part, and it is the part that makes the emotion nearly impossible to talk about honestly.

People who envy someone's faith very often, in the same breath, call that faith childlike. Naive. Simple. Unexamined. They want the certainty and they disdain the person for having it (Kroesbergen, 2020). That combination is exactly what separates envy from admiration. Envy both covets and spoils. It reaches for the thing and diminishes it in the same motion (Kroesbergen, 2020; Brunning, 2024).

Why would a mind do that?

Because the desired good and the feared cost are tangled together. Faith is imagined as relieving doubt and moral responsibility, which sounds like relief. It is also imagined as demanding the surrender of freedom, complexity, and honest truth-seeking, which sounds like a loss (Kroesbergen, 2020). The same certainty that looks comforting from one angle looks like dogmatism from another. So the mind wants, and then defends itself from wanting by devaluing what it wants.

Kroesbergen illustrates the pattern with three thinkers, and I find it clarifying. Kierkegaard wanted faith as certainty about what is right, and could not have it in a form that could be publicly justified or taught. Wittgenstein wanted what he called absolute safety and redemption, and feared the surrender that receiving it seemed to require. Simone Weil wanted the comfort of belonging and of truth, and refused easy commitment because she believed it risked self-deception (Kroesbergen, 2020).

Three of the most rigorous minds of their century. Not one of them was suffering from insufficient religious education.

I think that should matter to anyone sitting in a community feeling like the only one who cannot get there. The wanting-and-refusing is not a personal defect. It is a documented structure of the experience.

Is Envy Always Destructive?

No, and this is the most useful finding I can hand you.

Envy comes in two forms, and they behave completely differently. Benign envy pushes a person to close the gap by improving their own position. Malicious envy pushes them to close the gap by pulling the other person down (Lange & Crusius, 2015; Van de Ven et al., 2009; Van de Ven, 2016). Both share the same painful core, a felt sense of inferiority, but they fork sharply from there (Crusius et al., 2019; Crusius et al., 2020).

What determines the fork? Appraisals. Specifically, whether the other person's advantage seems deserved, and whether closing the gap seems possible (Crusius et al., 2019; Van de Ven et al., 2011b; Li et al., 2021). When the advantage feels earned and the goal feels reachable, envy tends to become effort. When it feels undeserved or unreachable, envy curdles.

And that reachability condition is doing enormous work. Benign envy only motivates when the good appears attainable and under your control (Van de Ven et al., 2011a). When improvement feels impossible, envy does not convert into striving. It converts into admiration, and admiration, for all its warmth, does not generate motion (Van de Ven et al., 2011a; Van de Ven, 2017). You end up appreciating her faith from a great distance while doing nothing whatsoever about your own.

There is a related finding worth pairing with it. Extreme upward comparisons are less likely to energize effort and more likely to produce disengagement when the standard feels unattainable (Diel et al., 2025). Similar, reachable role models generate more inspiration and less malicious envy than idealized ones (Noon & Meier, 2019).

Read those two together and a practical instruction falls out, which I will state bluntly because I think it is the single most actionable thing in this article. Stop measuring yourself against the most spiritually accomplished woman you know. Not because she is not admirable. Because she is too far away to be useful, and the research says the distance is precisely what turns the comparison inert or corrosive.

Find the woman who is one step ahead of you. That comparison has somewhere to go.

What Does Envy Actually Cost?

I do not want to sell benign envy as harmless. The literature will not support that, and I would rather be accurate than encouraging.

Envy is associated with real damage over time. Mujcic and Oswald (2018) followed roughly 18,000 adults and found that higher envy predicted worse later mental health and slower growth in well-being. Not future flourishing. The opposite. Envy is not a neutral fuel that some people happen to burn cleanly.

It also erodes the space between people. Envy is linked to reduced prosociality and cooperation, and in workplaces it predicts social undermining, the quiet work of diminishing someone rather than competing with them (Boecker et al., 2022; Van Kleef & Lelieveld, 2021; Duffy et al., 2012; Li et al., 2021). Anyone who has spent time in a tight-knit religious community knows what that looks like when it goes spiritual. It rarely announces itself. It comes out as a comment about how someone's chesed is a bit performative, doesn't it.

And the environment we live in feeds it constantly. Passive scrolling reliably provokes comparison and envy, with average reductions in well-being and self-esteem (Verduyn et al., 2017; McComb et al., 2023). Upward comparison on social platforms predicts envy, and envy helps explain lower well-being and depressive symptoms in some users (Li, 2018; Chae, 2018; Krasnova et al., 2015).

Two honest caveats, because the research is more careful than the headlines. Effects are heterogeneous rather than uniform, meaning this hits some people hard and barely touches others (Meier & Johnson, 2021). And envy on these platforms can sometimes drive inspiration rather than damage, particularly when the person envied is genuinely similar and the goal genuinely reachable (Meier & Schäfer, 2018; Noon & Meier, 2019).

There is your fork again. Similar and reachable, or distant and idealized. The same emotion, two entirely different destinations.

The Reframe: Borrowed Lack Versus Endorsed Desire

Here is where I have landed, and it took a long time to say it cleanly.

Envy hands you a want. The question you almost never stop to ask is whether the want is yours.

Call the first kind borrowed lack. It is the deficit that did not exist until you looked. It appears when another person's measure quietly becomes your measure, which is exactly the mechanism the research describes: envy depends on the comparison being self-relevant, and it weakens sharply when relevance or a personal reference point is missing (Boecker et al., 2022; Duffy et al., 2012). Borrowed lack does not tell you what you need. It tells you what she has. Those are not the same sentence, and confusing them is most of the suffering.

Call the second kind endorsed desire. It is a good you have independently examined and judged worth wanting, whether or not anyone else has it. Brunning (2024) makes the point with philosophical precision: acting from envious inferiority is less authentic than pursuing something you have judged worth wanting on its own terms. She adds a caution I find genuinely bracing, that strong motivation is not automatically an advantage if it makes reflection harder or turns desire reactive. A person can be moving very fast in a direction they never chose.

The quiet work is the conversion. Taking borrowed lack and either endorsing it, honestly, as something you actually want, or setting it down.

And here is the faith-specific version, which is the piece I most want you to take with you. What gets envied in faith is certainty (Kroesbergen, 2020). But certainty is not faith. Certainty is what faith would be if faith were not necessary.

Nobody needs emuna about things they can see. Nobody has faith that the sun rose this morning. Faith is the specific work of holding a relationship with a Master of the World whose reasons you cannot audit, whose timeline you cannot see, and whose answer you may not receive in this lifetime. Remove the not-knowing and you have not perfected emuna. You have removed the conditions that make it emuna at all.

Certainty is faith's counterfeit. It looks like the real thing from across the room. It is the wrong currency.

Which means the borrowed lack you have been carrying is, in a strict sense, a longing for something that does not exist in the form you imagine it. Either she has real faith, in which case she is also living with the not-knowing and has simply learned to stand in it more quietly than you have. Or she has actual certainty, in which case what she has is not the thing you should want.

I lean toward the first. Most steadiness that reads as certainty from a distance turns out, up close, to be practice. Years of showing up. A hundred small returns after a hundred small collapses that nobody witnessed.

So What Does Faith Actually Do About Envy?

Not what most people think. It does not delete the desire.

The evidence suggests faith helps insofar as it converts comparison into a livable pattern of practices, deserved striving, and limits on insatiable wanting, rather than by erasing desire altogether (Kroesbergen, 2020; Crusius et al., 2020; Li et al., 2021). That is a much more modest claim than the one usually made from the front of the room, and I think it is also a truer one.

Three mechanisms, as far as I can read them.

Faith changes what counts as a good life. Envy needs a scoreboard. When the metric shifts from possessing another person's advantage to inhabiting practices and responsibilities you can actually live, the scoreboard loses jurisdiction (Kroesbergen, 2020). This is not a trick. It is a genuinely different definition of the target.

Faith supplies limits on insatiable wanting. When desire becomes bottomless, comparison stops producing striving and starts producing chronic dissatisfaction (Crusius et al., 2020). Structured practice, obligation, and the discipline of enough are, among other things, technologies for capping desire before it eats you.

Faith communities shift attention from rivalry to shared practice. Or they can. Communities are also, as everyone reading this knows, world-class envy factories when they become status-salient. The literature notes that shared practice and connected engagement produce better outcomes than passive scanning (Verduyn et al., 2017; Van Kleef & Lelieveld, 2021). Being in the room doing the thing beats watching other people be holy.

One more protective factor worth naming, because it is practical. Self-efficacy buffers the harm of comparison (Li, 2018). Belief in your own capacity to act is what keeps envy from collapsing into disengagement. Which is to say: the antidote to spiritual envy is not more shame about the envy. It is evidence that you can move.

What Wanting Your Own Portion Actually Means

Ben Zoma asked who is rich, and answered: the one who is happy with his portion. It is one of the most quoted lines in the tradition and one of the most abused, because it gets deployed as a rebuke. Stop wanting. Be satisfied. What is wrong with you.

I do not read it that way. The rich person is happy with his portion. The word doing the work is the possessive, not the happiness.

The research arrives at nearly the same place from an entirely different direction. Contentment appears not as the absence of desire but as desire reclaimed from comparison and made answerable to goods a person can actually endorse and pursue (Brunning, 2024; Crusius et al., 2020; Protasi, 2016). Learning to want your own portion looks less like suppressing comparison than filtering it: keeping what genuinely names a real good, discarding what merely amplifies dissatisfaction or imports someone else's standard (Crusius et al., 2020; Brunning, 2024).

That is the quiet work, and it has two halves. Most people only ever do one.

The first half is honest wanting. Naming what in faith you actually long for. Not the version you think you should want. The real one: to be less afraid, to feel the suffering meant something, to be held.

The second half is honest refusing. Naming what you are unwilling to counterfeit. Kroesbergen (2020) makes a point that is easy to skim past and I think is the most important sentence in his paper: the devaluation may contain a real warning. When some part of you looks at her faith and calls it simple, that reaction is not purely defensive. It may be telling you something accurate about what would be false if you tried to copy it.

What remains after both halves is your portion. Smaller than hers, possibly. Yours, certainly.

Seven Steps for the Quiet Work

1. Name what you envy with precision. Not "her faith." Smaller. Her calm at the funeral. Her ability to say a bracha and mean it. The fact that she does not seem to bargain. Envy is diagnostically useful only when it is specific (Kroesbergen, 2020; Van de Ven, 2017). Vague envy just corrodes.

2. Ask the attainability question first, not last. Benign envy only motivates when the good looks reachable and controllable (Van de Ven et al., 2011a). So ask honestly whether what you want is available to you with effort. If yes, you have a goal. If no, you have grief, and grief needs a different treatment than a self-improvement plan.

3. Trade the paragon for the woman one step ahead. Extreme, unreachable comparison targets produce disengagement rather than effort (Diel et al., 2025), while similar and attainable ones produce inspiration (Noon & Meier, 2019). Stop measuring yourself against the tzadeikes. Find the woman whose next step is one you could actually take.

4. Test the certainty assumption directly. Ask her whether it is ever hard. In my experience the answer is almost never no, and that conversation frequently ends the envy on the spot, because the interior turns out to bear no resemblance to the exterior you were comparing yourself against.

5. Read the contempt as data, not just as sin. When you catch yourself dismissing her faith as simple, ask what the contempt is protecting (Kroesbergen, 2020). Usually it is guarding a surrender you are not ready to make, and there is frequently something legitimate in the hesitation.

6. Change what you consume, not just how hard you try. Passive scrolling reliably produces comparison and envy (Verduyn et al., 2017; McComb et al., 2023). If a particular feed or group leaves you feeling spiritually bankrupt, that is an input, not a character flaw. Inputs are changeable. Shame is not a strategy.

7. Write your own portion down. On paper. What you have been given, what you survived, what you have been asked to carry. Envy runs on comparison and comparison runs in the dark. Most portions look considerably different once they are written out and looked at directly.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is faith envy? Faith envy is a mixed longing for the certainty, security, and meaning that faith appears to give other people, combined with resistance to the form of life that seems to produce it (Kroesbergen, 2020). It is envy rather than admiration because people often devalue the very faith they are longing for, calling it naive while wanting it.

Is envy always destructive? No. Benign envy motivates people to improve their own position, while malicious envy motivates them to diminish the other person (Lange & Crusius, 2015; Van de Ven et al., 2009). The branch point is whether the advantage seems deserved and the goal seems reachable (Van de Ven et al., 2011a). That said, envy overall predicts worse later mental health (Mujcic & Oswald, 2018).

Why do I envy people whose faith seems simple? Because what is envied is the felt steadiness under suffering, not the theology (Kroesbergen, 2020). Simplicity looks like access. From the outside, anyone's practice appears more seamless than it is, since you are comparing your own interior against their exterior, which is never a fair trade.

Does faith actually cure envy? Not by erasing desire. The evidence suggests faith helps when it converts comparison into livable practices, deserved striving, and limits on insatiable wanting (Kroesbergen, 2020; Crusius et al., 2020). It changes what counts as a good life rather than eliminating the wanting, which is a more modest and more honest claim.

What does wanting your own portion actually mean? It means desire reclaimed from comparison and made answerable to goods you can genuinely endorse and pursue (Brunning, 2024). It is not an instruction to stop wanting. It is an instruction to check whether the want is yours before you spend your life chasing it.

The Close

She is still across the room. She may be there for years.

You can spend those years measuring the distance, and the research is not ambiguous about how that ends. Eighteen thousand adults, followed over time, and the envious ones did not flourish. They did worse (Mujcic & Oswald, 2018).

Or you can do the quiet work. Quiet not because it is small, but because nobody will ever see it. There is no ceremony for the moment a woman stops wanting someone else's certainty and starts building something she can actually stand on. No one claps. It happens in a kitchen, usually, at an unremarkable hour.

Your portion is not the leftovers after the good faith was handed out. It is the specific set of losses, gifts, and unanswered questions that no one else on earth was given, and it arrives with an assignment attached that no one else can complete.

Certainty was never on offer. It was never what you were promised, and I have come to believe it was never what you needed.

Faith is not the absence of the gap. Faith is what you do while standing in it.

About the Author

Esther Adams, Psy.D., is a trauma-informed psychotherapist at Strides To Solutions, a published scholar, and the founder of Emuna Builders, a community of women building faith through practice rather than performance. She holds a Doctorate of Psychology and integrates evidence-based therapeutic approaches with Jewish spiritual life. She writes and practices in Israel.

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