Here is why we only envy our equals
And the need to narrow our pond
Envy is rarely random. It follows a logic so precise that, once you see it, the feeling almost makes sense.
Most of us do not spend our mornings tortured by the wealth of oil billionaires or the fame of film stars. Their lives are so far from ours, so architecturally different, that they barely register as a comparison.
What torments people, when envy does arrive, is something much closer: the colleague who got the promotion. The friend from university who seems to have assembled a life that looks, from the outside, exactly like the one you were aiming for.
The person two rungs above you, not twenty.
David Hume noticed this in the eighteenth century. ‘It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others that produces envy,’ he wrote, ‘but on the contrary, a proximity. A common soldier bears no envy for his general compared to what he will feel for his sergeant or corporal.’
This is the reference group problem.
We do not measure ourselves against humanity at large. We measure ourselves against those we consider our approximate equals, the people we grew up with, studied alongside, or ended up in the same industry as. These are the people whose progress we track. Their success, when it exceeds ours, does not simply register as a neutral fact but as evidence of something.
What worsens this is that modern life has dramatically expanded the reference group. For most of human history, people compared themselves to those they could actually see: their village, their trade, or their street. The range was narrow, and the comparisons were local. The possibilities for envy were, by necessity, limited.
Then came newspapers, then magazines, then television, then social media.
Suddenly, the reference group became enormous. Not the person at the next desk, but the thirty-five-year-old on a podcast who started a company, sold it, writes a newsletter with three hundred thousand subscribers, and is seemingly perfectly well-adjusted about all of it.
Psychologically, the effect is not that we feel inspired; the effect is that we feel behind, not poor in any absolute sense, but insufficient in a relative one.
Tocqueville saw this paradox before most.
Visiting the young United States in the 1830s, Tocqueville observed that Americans had more material comfort than almost any population in history, and yet a persistent, gnawing restlessness. Their European counterparts, living under more rigid hierarchies, did not seem to share.
In an aristocratic society, he wrote, the serf did not compare himself to the duke. The gap was too large, too permanent, too divinely ordained to generate envy in the usual sense. The peasant’s condition was hard but legible. He knew what he was and, crucially, what he could not become.
Democracy removed that, as suddenly everyone, in theory, could be anything, which meant everyone had to contend with the full spectrum of human achievement as a legitimate measure of their own. The result was not contentment. It was, as Tocqueville put it, ‘that strange melancholy often haunting inhabitants of democracies in the midst of abundance.’
There is no clean remedy for this.
The reference group has been expanding for 250 years and shows no signs of contracting. Still, there may be something worth doing in simply becoming more conscious of which comparisons you are actually making, and whether those comparisons are clarifying something or simply producing static.
William James proposed a small, somewhat austere thought: that our sense of ourselves depends not on our achievements in absolute terms, but on the ratio between what we achieve and what we expected to achieve. The smaller and more honest the pretension, the more likely we are to live inside it without suffering.
Not as a retreat, exactly, but as a deliberate act of narrowing the field. Finding, as Alain de Botton suggests, a smaller pond where your size is easier to know and easier to carry.