La Voz de Galicia – 19 de abril, 2026 →
It’s curious how we always want what we don’t have. It happens with small, tangible things, but also with big, intangible ones. Suddenly you want that book, even though you know you don’t need it, even though you already have a dozen waiting to be read, even though they no longer fit in your home. But at that moment you can buy it, and you end up doing so, and then you carry the book with you with a kind of bitterness, aware that right now you’re not going to read it, or you don’t need it, or you should be saving money.
But when that desire to have something is linked to something intangible, or to something someone else has and we don’t, that is when the most complex instinct of human nature comes into play. Cervantes wrote in Don Quixote: “Oh, envy, root of infinite wickedness and destroyer of virtue! All vices, Sancho, take along with them a bit of pleasure, but envy brings only disgust, animosity, and rage.” And I must admit that that vice Cervantes speaks of, that feeling—envy—is something greater than us. And no matter how much one tries not to desire what someone else has but one does not, however small or big it may be, sometimes, without even realizing it, we end up immersed in a kind of inexplicable bitterness that leads us to desire so deeply what we do not have that we forget the things we already do have: the ones that make us fortunate in the eyes of others, and that at some point we stopped experiencing as achievements.
None of us is free from that feeling. And precisely for that reason, today it is more important than ever to fight against it, because when the world is upside down, when what rules is envy and selfishness, perhaps generosity is the only thing that can save humanity from itself.
