Envy is a trap. Not just from a moral perspective, but because it’s also useless as a tool.
The problem with envy is that it’s fractal. No matter how far you zoom in, you just see the same patterns.
And once you give in to the mental pattern of envy, no matter how narrow your cohort, you’ll keep finding new distinctions to obsess over.
The person earning £30,000 envies the person at £60,000. Reach £60,000 and you start envying £150,000. Make £150,000 and suddenly millionaires become the reference point. Become a millionaire and you start measuring yourself against centi-millionaires and billionaires.
You’ll never quite escape this cycle.
Regional university professors envy Harvard professors. Harvard professors envy their peers with more citations. Nobel laureates envy other laureates who received "better" Nobels or more public recognition.
Alexander the Great supposedly wept because there were no more worlds to conquer. He’d built an empire stretching from Greece to India, yet the fractal nature of envy meant even total domination didn’t satisfy him.
This tells us something important: the problem with comparison isn’t just that the bar keeps moving. It’s that every time you clear a bar, the bar splits into more bars.
Rockefeller was the richest man in America but was consumed by status anxiety within his peer group of industrialists. Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and JP Morgan each envied aspects of each other’s empires despite being among the wealthiest humans who’d ever lived.
The richest men in Renaissance Florence sponsored competing artworks, and not always because they loved art. They loved outdoing their rivals. Cosimo de’ Medici was generous partly to neutralize envy from above, and partly because envy from below terrified him more.
Even within what most would consider the pinnacle of success, the fractal pattern continues. You just zoom in further and find new distinctions to obsess over.
Envy obscures a simple fact: you only want fragments of other people’s lives, never the whole package.
You may envy Musk’s wealth and influence but would never want the ketamine addiction, the public meltdowns, the estrangement from people he once loved. You envy the trophy without wanting to live the life that produced it.
The philosopher Schopenhauer wrote:
"We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people."
Envy is mimetic - you want what someone else wanted. Beneath that borrowed desire sits emptiness. Chasing external validation can never provide internal satisfaction because it wasn’t your desire to begin with.
Tolstoy opened Anna Karenina with a quote I recall often:
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
You envy your neighbour’s seemingly perfect life without seeing the nuanced anger, shame, regrets, and frustrations they live with privately. The facade you envy conceals miseries you can’t imagine.
Comparison is a trap specifically because it’s an infinite game with no winner. The fractal nature of envy means that even if you “win” at one level, the game just restarts at a higher resolution.
The only escape is to stop playing entirely. Define your own metrics. Measure yourself against your past self, not against other people’s curated highlights.
Because no matter how high you climb on someone else’s ladder, you’ll never reach your own destination.
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