Virtology GlobalAn initiative of Instituto Virtudes · Brazil
Your colleague’s promotion didn’t touch your salary, and it still ruined your week. Envy runs a hidden calculation, and that calculation is made of scarcity.
English editorial edition of Isabella Becker’s Portuguese essay, translated and adapted for international readers. The article presents Virtology’s interpretation; its specific theoretical mechanisms should be distinguished from independently established clinical findings.
The news that a friend made money can hurt more than the news that you lost some.
It sounds like an exaggeration until it happens. A colleague is promoted. A friend buys the house. Your brother opens a business and it works. Nothing changed in your account, your job or your home. Even so, something tightens. A vague discomfort, a slightly long silence before the congratulations, a sentence that slips out right afterwards: well, with a father like that.
Almost nobody calls this by its name. The name is envy, and it has a logic worth knowing, because it doesn’t stay in your mood. It reaches into what you do with your own money.
What comes in this section is not Virtology. It is research in economics and neuroscience, and it shows that this reaction appears in all kinds of people.
In 2005, the economist Erzo Luttmer cross-referenced income and well-being data for thousands of people in the United States. He compared people with the same income living in different neighborhoods. The result: the more their neighbors earned, the less happy people reported being, even with their own salary unchanged. The neighbor’s money weighed on their mood as if it were a loss.
In 2009, a group of Japanese researchers led by Hidehiko Takahashi put volunteers in a brain scanner and asked them to read stories about people more successful than themselves. When envy appeared, a region linked to pain lit up, the anterior cingulate. Then the volunteers read that those same people had suffered a setback. This time the ventral striatum lit up, a region linked to reward. The most uncomfortable detail came at the end: the stronger the pain signal in the first moment, the stronger the pleasure in the second.
The two studies say the same thing by different routes. The brain treats the success of people close to us as a threat, and treats their fall as relief. This is not moral theory. It was measured.
Research shows what happens. Virtology, the framework developed by Dr. Eduardo Casarotto, explains why.
For Virtology, envy is not a separate feeling. It is desire. The book describes the calculation with uncomfortable frankness: envy is purely a desire, and in the brain there is a calculation that if you destroy the other person, you will get what they have. The calculation is unconscious. Nobody thinks I’m going to destroy my friend to get their car. But the primitive brain runs the sum anyway.
We don’t only envy objects. We envy states. The book gives the example of a cup. I have a cup and I’m happy with it. Someone else looks and says I’d like one too. They don’t want the cup. They want the state of happiness. That is why a colleague’s promotion hurts even when you didn’t want that job. What hurts is the satisfaction, the security and the importance they seem to have gained.
The path of envy, the book says, is to destroy the bearer of the desired object. And the most common path of destruction is criticism. That is why criticism shows up so quickly after someone else’s good news. It isn’t an assessment. It is envy trying to bring down the one who rose.
Envy only makes sense in a world where there is little. If he won, there is less left for me. If she made it, the place is taken. The other person’s achievement becomes proof that the pie got smaller. Researchers who studied dozens of countries call this the belief in a zero-sum game: the idea that one person’s gain is always another’s loss. In many situations in life, it is false. The client your colleague won was not yours. The house your friend bought was not reserved for you.
Virtology explains where this arithmetic comes from. In the brain there is what it calls pride: an ancient system, born of life in a group, that measures position. For most of our species’ history, your position in the group decided who ate first and who was protected. That is why pride reads the world as a ranking. When someone near you goes up, you go down in the table, even without having lost anything. The pain is real. The loss isn’t.
And there is a second system, which Virtology calls selfishness: the question what’s in it for me always arriving first. For selfishness, the other person’s success only has value if it yields something for me. Since it doesn’t, it is just a reminder of what I don’t have.
Envy rarely shows up as envy. It shows up as opinion, as a sense of justice, as a joke.
These signs are the ancient system working as it was built to work. And that working has a price.
Before the criticism, before the line about life being unfair, there is a physical moment. Anyone paying attention can catch it.
It is usually quick. A tightening in the chest or stomach while the good news is being told. A face that hardens slightly. An urge to change the subject. Sometimes a pang of tiredness for no reason, as if the conversation had become heavy. The body registered someone else’s achievement as your loss. It is the felt side of what Takahashi measured in the lab.
Virtology treats these bodily signals as information, not as a verdict. The book calls them somatic markers: responses of the body that fire before reasoning, recorded by old experiences. They won’t disappear, and they shouldn’t. What is trained is something else: noticing the signal, naming it, and not acting on it automatically. Between the tightening and the criticism there is a small gap. That gap is where the work happens.
Many people resist recognizing envy because the word sounds like an accusation. Envy seems like something petty people feel, and nobody wants to be that person. So the feeling is pushed down, and from there it keeps operating, now disguised as opinion.
That is why it helps to separate two things. Feeling envy is the ancient system working. It is in everyone, because everyone descends from people who competed for position in the group and survived. What you do with envy is a choice. Criticism, the shortcut, spending so as not to fall behind, and contempt are choices, even when they seem automatic. And choices can be trained.
Admitting I felt envy is, in fact, the first gesture of Humility on this subject. It is recognizing your own size without shrinking and without inflating. Someone who can’t admit it is stuck with two bad exits: deny and criticize, or accuse themselves and hide. Both keep the arithmetic of scarcity running.
Envy doesn’t stay in your mood. It enters your decisions, and the book shows how.
The first path is the shortcut. In the chapter on Honesty, the book describes envy as one of the roots of dishonesty, and the least visible: the discomfort at what the other person has makes you feel entitled to a shortcut. I deserve it too. The small tax dodge, the product sold above its worth, the promise made with no intention of keeping it. And the book links this root to Takahashi’s study: the more envy hurts, the greater the pleasure when the envied person loses, and the more tempting the shortcut becomes.
The second path is spending so as not to fall behind. Your friend’s new house becomes the renovation you hadn’t planned. Your colleague’s trip becomes your trip on the credit card. It isn’t a desire to have. It is a desire not to drop in the table.
The third path is contempt. When you can’t catch up, the way out is to disqualify. Money doesn’t bring happiness. Rich people are all the same. The book calls this projection: associating money with bad people to justify your own lack. And it is blunt about the result: nobody prospers in what, deep down, they condemn.
The fourth path is the energy that drains away. Time spent watching, comparing and criticizing is time that didn’t go into your own work. Envy fills the mind the same way lack does. It is scarcity in another form.
The book offers a simple tool, and it appears in the chapter on Nonjudgment, in the form of a trigger statement:
This question does something precise. It takes the focus off the other person and brings it back to you. While attention is on the other’s flaw, the desire stays hidden, and a hidden desire never becomes action. When you name what you wanted, the desire appears. And a desire that appears can become a plan.
Sometimes the answer is concrete: I wanted that job. Then the next question is what am I doing to get there? Sometimes the answer is a state: I wanted the calm she seems to have. Then the next question is different, and deeper: what am I missing, that I was charging to her account?
Virtology doesn’t treat envy with a single virtue. It works in combinations, and the book defines the combination for the axis of pride, vanity, power, competition and envy:
And there is a second set, which the book points to specifically so that envy doesn’t take root in you. Three virtues together: State of Certainty, Gratitude and Responsibility. Each one attacks a piece of the arithmetic.
The order matters. Gratitude laid over an envy without Humility becomes lip service: good for him, said with a clenched jaw. That is why the work starts at the foundation. First admit. Then let go of the ranking. Only then, be grateful.
Nobody stops feeling envy all at once. The ancient system is still there, and it still fires. What changes is what happens after it fires.
Someone who has worked on these virtues feels the tightening at the good news, recognizes it, and asks the question. The tightening passes faster. The congratulations come out whole. And, over time, something appears that a person living in the arithmetic of scarcity can’t see: the success of people close to you widens your world. The friend who opened the business knows things you don’t. The promoted colleague opened a door you didn’t know existed.
Virtology has a concept for this, which it calls the spotlight: you can only desire what you have already seen. I wrote about it in You cannot want what you have never seen. Someone else’s success, looked at without envy, is one more possibility entering your field of vision.
Swap the criticism for the question. Seven days observing the arithmetic of scarcity.
This article is part of a series on prosperity. If you haven’t read it yet, start with Prosperity is not a money problem, which explains why my prosperity training starts with Humility and Selflessness.
The whole subject is in my course Architecture of the Possible — The Neuroscience of Abundance, my brain-training method for prosperity. It launches in November, in Portuguese; the English version of the course comes later, and the book is out in English at launch.
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Envy is human and everyone feels it. If it is taking up most of your thoughts, damaging important relationships or coming together with a sadness that doesn’t lift, it is worth seeking support from a qualified professional. Understanding the mechanism helps, and it does not replace care.
Looking for a certified Virtologist, information about the training, or a partnership outside Brazil? Write to the international director for your region.
Write to Isabella Becker · EMEA →Write to Ana Karolina Cejudo · Americas →Want the whole framework, for yourself or to help others as a professional? Start with the short course, or take the full training with Dr. Eduardo Casarotto.
The Institute’s Professional Formation with Dr. Eduardo Casarotto is the complete training: the entire framework, the clinical method and the certification to practice.
Explore the Professional Formation →Translated and edited from the Portuguese essay.