Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall
“Whenever a friend succeeds a little something in me dies,” confessed the acid-tongued American writer Gore Vidal in an interview. In doing so he expressed an emotion that nobody likes to admit to, even though it overcomes all of us from time to time. It’s the most pointless, useless and toxic of all emotions. It’s envy.
Not that the pointlessness of envy is a fresh insight. Even the Greek philosophers warned against it. The Bible illustrates its destructive power with dozens of stories, above all in the parable of Cain and Abel. Snow White, that criminological fairytale, is an exemplary tale of envy.
Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell likewise considered envy one of the most important sources of unhappiness. Envy has a bigger impact on your life satisfaction then physical affliction or financial ruin, and the ability to manage it is fundamental to the good life. If you can pull that off, that’s a major breakthrough. Unfortunately, we’re dealing with an evolutionary program that’s tough to outwit.
Envy is not only a human emotion; it’s actually an animal instinct. The primate researchers Frans de Waal and Sarah Brosnan rewarded two capuchins for simple tasks with a piece of cucumber each. Seemingly satisfied, the monkeys gratefully accepted their pieces of cucumber. Next time, however, the researchers rewarded one capuchin with another piece of cucumber but the other with a sweet grape. When the first monkey saw that, it threw its piece of cucumber out of its cage and refused to cooperate.
This is the interesting thing about envy: the more we compare ourselves with others, the greater the danger of jealousy. Above all, we envy those who are similar to us in terms of age, career, environment and lifestyle. Tennis pros compare themselves with tennis pros, top executives with top executives, writers with writers. You’re not comparing yourself with the Pope, so you’re not jealous of him. Ditto for Alexander the Great or a super-successful Stone Age human from your part of the world. Ditto for someone on another planet, a majestic great white shark, or a gigantic Redwood tree. None of them—magnificent beings though they may be—is a suitable object of envy.
And here we have the solution to the problem. Stop comparing yourself to other people and you’ll enjoy an envy-free existence. Steer well clear of all comparisons. That’s the golden rule.
Easier said than done. Sometimes comparisons are practically shoved down your throat. The University of California, for instance, is obliged by law to make the salaries of its researchers public. There’s a website where researchers can see what their colleagues earn. If you’re in the bottom half, you’ll be less satisfied with your job than before you were given that information. In other words, transparency has squashed happiness.
Another much larger, frankly enormous experiment in comparison is social media. By now it’s common knowledge that Facebook leaves many users frustrated and tired. In a study at Humboldt University, researchers decided to find out why. Top of the list? You guessed it: envy. Understandably so, because Facebook is practically designed to make similar people compare themselves with each other—it’s a perfect breeding ground for resentment. I’d recommend giving social media a wide berth. All those silly statistics (likes, followers, friends, etc.) generate a hyper-propensity for comparison that begets unhappiness. And not only that. The images uploaded have nothing to do with your friends’ normal lives. They’ve been meticulously curated, giving the (fake) impression that others in your social circle are doing better than they really are.
Never before have so many people compared themselves with so many others. The internet has turned jealousy into a modern-day epidemic. So after you withdraw from social media, you should try to minimize the urge to compare yourself with others in everyday life, too. Avoid school reunions, for example. Unless you’re top dog in all possible respects—income, status, health, family wellbeing. Yet how will you know that unless you attend? You can’t—that’s why you don’t go in the first place.
Choose a place to live, a city, a neighborhood where you’re in the “local elite.” The same goes for your peer group. Don’t join a rotary club full of millionaires unless you’re also wealthy. You might be better off with the volunteer fire service—and you’ll be doing something meaningful.
Above all, however, be aware of the focusing illusion, which we discussed in Chapter 11. Let’s say you’re envious of your neighbor because he’s inherited a glossy silver Porsche 911 Turbo. You can see the “silver kitten,” as your neighbor affectionately calls his vehicle, neatly parked outside from your living-room window. Every time he revs the engine it’s like a tiny knife to the heart. Yet this is purely because you’re focusing on the wrong thing. In comparing your neighbor’s life with your own, you focus automatically on the aspects that are different—his Porsche 911 compared to your VW Golf. In doing so you’re overestimating their importance on your life satisfaction. You believe your neighbor is significantly happier than you, but viewed objectively a car contributes very little (if anything) to overall wellbeing as we saw in Chapter 12. If you’re aware of the focusing illusion, you can lessen jealousy’s sting. Remember, the things you envy are all far less important than you think.
If none of that works and you’re still seething with jealousy, it’s time to bring out the big guns: deliberately identifying the worst aspects of the person’s life and imagining them struggling with those problems. It’ll make you feel instantly better. Admittedly, it’s not a very noble solution, but it’s something to fall back on in an emergency.
If your own life happens to be especially enviable, stay modest. That way you’ll be doing your bit to protect others from the worst pangs of jealousy. Modesty is your contribution to the greater good. The greatest challenge of success is keeping quiet about it, as they say. If you’re going to be proud of anything, be proud of that.
So what should you take away from all this? That there’s always going to be someone in your neighborhood, your social circle or your field of work who’s doing better than you. Accept it. The sooner you can wipe envy from your repertoire of emotions, the better.