Is It Okay to Be Jealous of Other Musicians?
- Gökçe Kutsal
- Apr 15, 2025
- 12 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
* Where I describe clients in my blog posts, I've changed names, instruments, and other identifying details to protect their privacy. Sometimes I'm describing one person, sometimes a pattern I've seen across several. The essence of the experience and what we worked on together remain true.
When I was a teenager, I was planning to audition for the opera department of the university I wanted to attend.
(You know, the audition that never happened in the end, because they closed the department that year... but that's a different story.)
Before the audition, I was lucky enough to be invited for what was described to me as an 'informal chat' with the dean of the faculty.
The dean who was also the conductor of the symphony orchestra. An impressive musician, by any measure.
I went in expecting something between an interview and a welcome... here's what we look for, here's what to expect, good luck.
That couldn't be farther from what happened.
He looked at me kindly, and then he said something I couldn't forget since then.
You should know how competitive and toxic this world can be. I'm telling you because I've seen it firsthand. Your friends will always be your competition. Even your best friend will hope for your slip-ups. They probably won't actively try to sabotage you. They probably won't, for example, open a window over your bed the night before a big concert so you'll wake up sick.
He paused. Then said:
But if they walked past your room and noticed you'd fallen asleep with the window open and it was getting cold... they wouldn't close it. Choose your career accordingly.
I was, I think, eighteen... and I have thought about that conversation more times than I can count.
He wasn't wrong about the dynamic... every working musician I've coached has run into some version of what he was describing.
He wasn't wrong that the profession produces it. And he wasn't wrong that the not-closing-the-window version is more common than the actively-opening-it version, which makes it harder to see and much harder to talk about.
But what the dean didn't have the language for (what almost nobody has the language for) is that what he was describing actually has a name.
Two names, in fact. And learning to tell them apart is one of the most useful things a professional musician can do.
A Distinction Worth Getting Clear
The first thing I want to do is clean up a small linguistic confusion that runs through every conversation about this, because it makes the topic harder to talk about clearly.
(Also, if you're a non-native English speaker like me, hi! This part might especially be relevant for you, since these two words sometimes translate to the same one in some languages.)
When musicians say I'm jealous of my colleague, they almost always mean envy, not jealousy. Psychologists make a real distinction:
Jealousy is the fear of losing something (or someone) you already have to a third party. I'm jealous because my partner has been spending a lot of time with this other person. That's the classic shape with three people involved, something at stake that's currently yours.
Envy is the painful feeling of wanting something someone else has. I want what my colleague has, like the career, the recognition, the position. That's two people, and something you don't currently possess.
What we feel when we watch another musician's career take off is envy.
Jealous is just the word English-speakers reach for because the language doesn't have a clean alternative.
(Some languages do... Russian has separate words for white and black envy, Dutch has benijden and afgunst, Turkish has gıpta for the admiring kind and kıskançlık that doubles for both.)
But I'm not trying to be pedantic. It matters because the linguistic confusion makes this emotion harder to talk about, and if you don't have clear words for something, you can't think about clearly either.
Once you're using the right word, it gets even more confusing... because the next thing to know is that there isn't one form of envy. There are two.
Two Kinds of Envy
This distinction comes from research by social psychologist Niels van de Ven and colleagues at Tilburg University, building on work going back to Aristotle. They named two kinds of envy that look similar from the outside, feel similar in the moment, but lead to completely different outcomes.
Benign envy. Painful, but it points you upward. They have something I want. I'm going to work toward having that too.The mechanism is straightforward: the other person becomes a kind of north star, and your envy fuels effort, focus, learning, and aspiration. You admire them, you can be genuinely happy for them, and you can use what they've shown is possible as motivation for your own work. Benign envy is uncomfortable. But it moves you.
Malicious envy. Also painful, but it points you sideways or downward. They have something I want. I want them to lose it. The mechanism is different: instead of pulling yourself up, you find yourself wanting to pull them down. Subtle dismissals — well, they only got it because of [reason]. Quiet relief when they hit a setback. The reluctance to share their news with mutual friends. The unwillingness to close the window.
The research has a few findings worth knowing:
Both forms feel unpleasant. You can't tell which one you're having by how it feels. You can only tell by noticing what it makes you want to do.
Benign envy correlates with motivation, effort, and pushing toward your own goals. Malicious envy correlates with disengagement, coasting, and (in workplace studies) leaving the field altogether.
The trigger for which kind you feel often depends on whether the other person's success seems deserved. When the success looks earned through effort, benign envy is more likely. When it looks like luck, connections, or unfair advantage, malicious envy is more likely.
Benign envy and the happy-for-them response peak at moderate upward comparisons. Malicious envy and schadenfreude spike at extreme upward comparisons — especially when the gap feels uncrossable.
I find that this last finding matters a lot in this profession. Because everything about classical music (the scarcity, the visibility of the few who make it, the gap between the soloists you watch and the working musician you are) produces extreme upward comparisons by default.
The structural conditions tilt the system toward the malicious form.
Where Musicians Usually Land
Here's something I want to be honest about: In my coaching practice, the version of envy I see is almost always the malicious one.
Mind you, the musicians I work with aren't bad people. Far from it. Most of them are unusually kind, unusually generous, unusually invested in the success of their peers in their better moments.
But the structural conditions of the profession push them toward the malicious form, and the malicious form is what arrives in coaching sessions.
Here's how it tends to show up:
A colleague gets a position, and the client hears about it. There's an immediate small drop in their own sense of themselves. They got it and I didn't. What does that say about me? They congratulate the colleague (often genuinely). They post the supportive message. Then they spend the next week quietly assessing their own career against the colleague's career and finding themselves wanting. The envy isn't being used to point at what I want to work toward. It's being used as evidence in an internal trial about whether the client is good enough to be doing this at all.
Or a peer goes on social media with a great review, a major debut, an exciting new project, and the client scrolls past it. There's a moment of good for them, and then there's a much longer moment of why am I not where they are. By the end of the scroll, the client has not been inspired by the peer's success. They've been diminished by it.
Or a more successful peer hits a setback: A debut that didn't go well, a position they didn't get, a bad review... and the client hears about it. And underneath the polite oh no, I'm so sorry to hear that, there's a quiet flicker of something that isn't quite relief and isn't quite satisfaction but is close enough to both to be uncomfortable.
That flicker is called schadenfreude — the German word for taking small pleasure in another's misfortune — and it's what the dean was describing when he talked about not closing the window.
He wasn't claiming musicians want to actively harm each other, but he was describing exactly this:
The withholding of a small kindness. The not-quite-reaching-out. The faint sense that the playing field has been slightly leveled by the other person's stumble.
This is the part almost nobody admits to. And it's the part most worth talking about, because the shame about feeling it is often more damaging than the feeling itself.
The Second Loop
Here is what tends to happen when a musician notices malicious envy in themselves, or, even worse, schadenfreude at a colleague's setback.
They feel terrible about feeling it.
The internal voice that arrives is something like: I'm a horrible person. What kind of musician feels relieved when a friend's career stumbles? This is petty. This is small. This isn't who I want to be.
The shame about the envy is itself painful, and it usually comes faster and louder than the envy did.
This is the second loop, and it does more damage than the first one.
Because what the second loop does is bury the original feeling without processing it. The musician feels envy. They feel ashamed of feeling envy. They push the envy down. They tell themselves they shouldn't feel that way. They perform extra warmth toward the colleague to compensate. They don't sit with the envy long enough to figure out what it was telling them.
So the envy doesn't go away. It just becomes invisible, even to the person experiencing it. It runs in the background of their professional life, shaping which colleagues they avoid, which good news they don't quite want to hear, which opportunities they don't go after because something about it would feel like competing with so-and-so... without ever being conscious enough to be examined.
You can be a good person and have uncomfortable feelings about your colleagues. The two are not in contradiction. Most of the working musicians I respect deeply have, at some point, admitted to me (often with eyes looking down, often after years of carrying it) that they have envied a peer in ways they're ashamed of.
But the shame doesn't make them worse musicians or worse people. It just makes them less able to learn from the envy.
The Social Media Part
One of the most interesting pieces of research I've seen can help to explain why the envy feels way more destructive in the age of social media.
Human brains evolved to handle social comparison within groups of around 150 people. This is the rough number — sometimes called Dunbar's number — that anthropologists associate with the size of stable social groups across most of human history. Tribes, villages, congregations, military units, work circles...
The comparison system in your brain was calibrated for that scale.
You are now doing comparison, multiple times a day, with thousands of strangers. And even worse, those strangers are presenting only their highlight reels.
The peer who got the position posts about the position. The peer who didn't get it doesn't post anything. The peer who's having a creative crisis or financial trouble or who's been quietly unemployed for six months is, by definition, the one you don't hear from.
So the upward comparisons available to you on any social platform are systematically extreme...
And, as we covered above, extreme upward comparisons are exactly the conditions that push envy toward the malicious form.
This means that if you're spending forty-five minutes a day looking at curated successes of peers, you're loading your nervous system with the specific kind of comparison input that the research links to malicious envy and disengagement.
The system was not designed for this.
I know, knowing that doesn't fix it, but it can help you stop blaming yourself for finding the experience hard...
And maybe make the decision to reduce your scrolling time a bit easier.
What the Two Kinds of Envy Are Actually Telling You
Here's my perspective on this whole situation:
Both kinds of envy are information.
The shame about feeling them gets in the way of hearing what they're saying. So let me name what each one is actually pointing at.
Benign envy is a north star. When you watch a colleague do something and you feel that mix of admiration and I want that too... that envy is one of the most useful diagnostic emotions a working musician has. It tells you what you actually care about, often more honestly than your conscious goals do. People will tell you they want a career as a soloist because that's what serious musicians aspire to, but if their actual envy fires hardest watching a colleague who has built a beautiful chamber music life, that's the truer signal. The envy knows what you want. Listen to it.
In coaching, I'll often ask a client: What about this person do you envy specifically? The answers are almost always revealing. The parts they name are the ones that look like the parts they actually want, even if those parts don't match the official goal they've been pursuing. Benign envy points at what you're actually trying to build, often more accurately than your stated ambitions do.
Use it. Let your envy tell you what to work toward. Treat the people you envy as proof of what's possible, not as evidence of your inadequacy.
Malicious envy is also information, but it's pointing at something different.
When the envy turns malicious, when you find yourself wanting the other person to lose what they have, or feeling that flicker of relief at their setback... that's a sign that something underneath needs attention. Not that you're a bad person.
Usually one of three things:
The gap feels uncrossable. When you believe you can't reach what they have, the envy turns toward wanting them not to have it either. The leveling instinct kicks in. If you find this happening, the question isn't why am I so petty (that doesn't help anything)... the question is do I actually believe this is reachable for me, and if not, why not?
The success looks unfair. When you believe the other person got what they have through luck, connections, or advantages you don't have, malicious envy is more likely than benign. The question here is whether your assessment is accurate... and whether, even if it is, the energy you're spending on the unfairness is doing anything to help you build what you want.
Something underneath the envy needs naming. Sometimes the malicious envy is pointing at exhaustion, at a particular professional disappointment, at grief about a path you didn't take, at burnout you haven't admitted to yourself yet. The envy is the surface symptom of something bigger that the conscious mind hasn't gotten to.
My point being, you're a human in a competitive profession watching a curated stream of peers' successes... of course the system gets pushed toward the malicious form sometimes. You can't just get rid of a very human emotion.
But what you can do is to notice when you're in it, ask what it's actually pointing at, and not pile shame on top of the original feeling.
And then, to use what you learn to gently move the envy toward the benign form.
That shift isn't always available, but when it is, it usually looks like this:
They have something I want. The gap feels real. But maybe it isn't uncrossable. What's the smallest step I could take toward what they have?
So the envy stops being about them. It becomes about you again.
(I've also written about a similar mechanism before. If the act of comparing yourself to other musicians is the surface, envy is what usually lives underneath it.)
Coming Back to The Dean's Office
I want to come back to that office for a moment...
The dean wasn't wrong, the profession does produce envy. Friends do hold complicated feelings about each other's careers. The not-closing-window version of the betrayal is, indeed, more common than the window-opening version.
The more useful question, I think, is:
Can you learn to be honest with yourself about the envy when it arrives in you? Can you hear what it's telling you? Can you not pile so much shame on top of it that you lose access to the information underneath?
Across the clients I've worked with over the years, the ones who've built the careers they actually wanted weren't the ones who didn't feel envy. They were the ones who learned to feel it, name it, and let it do its actual work. They turned a feeling most people experience as a personal failing into something that quietly pointed them toward what they cared about.
If I could go back to that office now, what I think I'd say to the 18-year-old me is this:
Your friends might be envious of you, and you might be envious of them. That's okay. Choose to be the kind of person who can sit with their envy. That's the one who closes the window.
If envy has been running in the background of your professional life and you'd like to do something more useful with it, private coaching is where we'd start.
About
I'm Gökçe Kutsal, a music performance coach for professional orchestra musicians and opera singers, with an MA in Voice Pedagogy and over 2,100 hours of coaching and teaching experience. I work with principals, titled positions, and audition candidates across Europe, the UK, North America, and Australia — and I write about performance anxiety, audition preparation, and the craft of practice for musicians who already have the technique and are trying to work out why it doesn't always hold up under pressure.
Research cited & further reading
van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2009). Leveling up and down: The experiences of benign and malicious envy. Emotion, 9(3), 419–429. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015669
van de Ven, N. (2016). Envy and its consequences: Why it is useful to distinguish between benign and malicious envy. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 10(6), 337–349. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12253
Nakai, A., & Numazaki, M. (2026). The emotional nature of malicious and benign envy: Separate measurements for emotion and motivation. Japanese Psychological Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpr.12568
Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6), 469–493.
