Not long ago, I was a New York City public school teacher. I’d get up every morning at 6AM, get on the M4 bus, and spend the entire ride thinking, I can’t do this. I could blame the overcrowded classrooms, financial strain, and bad management commonplace in the city’s public schools for the misery and fear I felt as I headed to work each day. But none of those things mattered once I closed my classroom door and faced my students. The reason for my unhappiness: I simply hated my job.

The M4 was not a minor character along my path toward a major career change. Every morning, I would see other people going off to work, both on the bus and along the route. And I envied what I thought they did for a living. They were ad execs, artists, social workers, doctors, and business-owners. I watched them come out of apartment houses on the Upper West Side and wondered what salary they made to enable them to afford such fancy doorman buildings. I would see the women’s shoes and wonder how much they cost – $500, $800, $1000? Likely, more than I made in a week in a job which, I was certain, inflicted more stress on a daily basis than they had experienced in their entire careers. Of course, it wasn’t reality that was playing with my mind each day as I fantasized about how everyone had it better than I did. The only part that was real was the result: I quit my job and found a career I love.

There’s something about being miserable about any aspect of life when you live in New York City – be it work, apartment, wardrobe, or even an order at a restaurant. One needs only to look around to find someone who’s got it better, or as important for a New Yorker, appears to. Once such greener pastures catch the eye, one of two things takes over: utter gloom or complete determination to go for something better. Luckily for me, I gained a renewed sense of purpose and moved on. I suppose it took gumption to drop everything to be a writer, which probably falls in the top five least stable career choices. But I don’t attribute my resolve to having guts of steel. I have only my favorite deadly sin and the Best City to feed my envy. Where else is every choice out there laid out in front of you, every day?

I remember when I was dragged to church as a child, asking my mother the meaning of the word “covet” – as in “thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife.” “Envy,” she told me. In our Catholic household, envy was a sin. But it wasn’t until I was older, old enough to choose not to go to church with my mother, that I began to question what was so bad about wanting what other people have. Taking what other people have is one thing, but desiring what they have and then going for it yourself is quite another. How does anyone grow into adulthood unless armed with envy for the things that others do and have?

Victor Hugo wrote, “The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.” This may be the best articulation of why envy is a sin. The claim is that such longing for the talent, money, or look of another only breeds hate and anger at the one possessed of such fortune. It’s no surprise that Buddhism has an equivalent for envy, called issa – defined as “a feeling of discontent and resentment aroused by and in conjunction with desire for the possessions or qualities of another” – that is also condemned. Craving leads to suffering, making issa an unwholesome place to be.

One might apply the same description to our beloved city. Much of our population comes here in search of the fabulous lifestyle portrayed in television, movies, and the grapevine of rumors similar to those that convinced early immigrants that American streets were paved with gold. Anyone who has lived in New York knows full well that the kind of apartments, social scene, and clothing portrayed in entertainment are not so easily attainable. But thanks to the coveted New York lifestyle, however rare or even mythical some of us believe it to be, our reputation for being fast-paced, hardworking, and uncompromising is anything but fictional. So given that feelings of envy can inspire such drive for success as much as they can inflate feelings of bitterness, it is really the resulting state of mind that should be condemned as the sin.

To me, jealousy is envy’s evil twin. Jealous, one is planted in one’s feelings with no plans or motivation for escape. That, to me, is indeed a sin. There were days on the M4 when my feelings of resentment were dense and unwavering. Yet without anyone to envy, I can’t say that I would have had the motivation to seek a better life for myself – something that would make me happy to go to work every day.

The alternative to envy, honest and unreserved applause for those who have achieved something we would like for ourselves, sounds a bit yuk and let’s face it, you’d have to be dead to be that detached. And to what end? As long as the energy conjured from our feelings of envy are cultivated into a focused, relentless push toward what has been dangled in front of us, then our only sin may be the things we do to get there. And that opens up other, far more socially corrosive alternatives that just happen to take away your freedom to feed your little green friend.

After all, envy is not something that magically disappears and not being able to chase that particular dragon will kill you.