Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreign. This is the Baywall podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co host, Brent Billings. Today I'm with Reed Dent to talk about envy.
B (0:13)
So there's this movie called the talented Mr. Ripley. Young Matt Damon, an all star cast. Gwyneth Paltrow, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Jude law came out 99. And Matt Damon plays this young man, Tom Ripley. He's a mercurial figure and he's kind of a con man and he's pretending to be someone else as he's traveling like around Europe. And there are some people who know who he is and some people who think he's this someone else. And there is murder involved eventually. And I don't want to spoil the whole movie, but it kind of all of the lies start to stack up and he's in danger of being fully found out. And at the end of the movie there is this amazing, ominous scene where he is for once like having an honest, vulnerable conversation sort of with somebody right before he kills them. But he has this line that sticks with me. That is kind of the essence, I think, of what envy is. He's talking to this person in kind of a confession. He says, I'm lost and I've lied about who I am and where I am and now no one will ever find me. And the line then that he says is, I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody. And of course, now for our daily Buechner, who defines envy this way. He says envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else be as unsuccessful as you are. Wow. I gotta say, this conversation about envy. Envy is a tough one to talk about because there's very little to like, commend in envy. Lots of the other vices, like there are, there's something fun about them, there's something pleasurable about them at least. And envy is kind of like the vice that is sort of mo is just living in misery. And so it's not fun. And it forces us to confront, I think, some unflattering things about ourselves. I mean, they all do, right? But I think the hard thing about envy is that it forces us to confront the ways in which we see ourselves to be inferior or unflattering and then how we let that eat us up inside about other people who we always, of course, take to be not inferior. And anyway, we'll get into that. This is falling. There is, as we've said on the, on the series, there are many different ways to think about how the vices feed into each other. And It's a very instructive, I think, exercise to think about how they pair up and how they lead one to another, but there's not, like, a strict ordering of them. But this episode is going to be coming on the heels of our episode that we just did on Vainglory, and it's kind of its weird inverse opposite, where Vainglory has very much an obsession with kind of how I am perceived. Envy has an obsession with how other people are perceived and how I stack up against that. So let's just have a little bit of a conversation first, in kind of keeping with the way we've been doing this and try to get our minds around what it is that we're talking about when we talk about envy. Because, as with the other vices, there's, like, sort of a surface level way that we think about it, and then it tends to go much deeper. And, of course, the hard thing about going deeper is the deeper you go, the more you realize, like, actually, this does apply to me. Right. Where the surface level, it's like, oh, yeah, that's not really my thing. And then you look and I mean, keep saying this throughout this whole part of the series that's on the vices is. I think they're kind of all my thing, Brent. If I'm being really honest, they're all my thing.