Consider the following comments on envy.
Envy is the art of counting another's blessings instead of your own.
Anonymous
Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Comparison is the thief of joy.
Anonymous
Envy is the one vice nobody confesses to, because it admits we wanted what we could not have.
There is a kind of envy that points like a compass to the life you actually want.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that envy is the most secret of feelings precisely because it exposes our wanting, and that it can either corrode us or quietly instruct us. Open with a particular scene, the small sting of a friend's good news, the scroll through other people's curated lives. Then explore the tension between envy as poison, which sours our own blessings, and envy as signal, which tells us what we truly value but had not admitted. A useful structural move distinguishes envy that wants to pull others down from longing that wants to lift ourselves up. Caution: avoid the tidy moral that you should simply count your blessings, since that advice often shames the feeling rather than understanding what it is trying to say.