Envy is Fractal

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.

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. It still wasn't enough. There's always another level once you learn to look for it.

Achievement doesn't cure envy. Neither does attainment. You just return to square one at a slightly higher altitude.

I’ve talked a few times about the shadows that plague the richest men in the world. Elon Musk has been divorced multiple times and has fractured relationships with several of his children. Jeff Bezos divorced. Bill Gates divorced. Warren Buffett's first wife stayed legally married but materially separated for years. J. Paul Getty refused to pay his grandson's ransom to save money. Howard Hughes died alone, mentally ill, despite being the richest man alive.

Ernest Hemingway achieved literary immortality - the thing writers dream of - and shot himself.

Once you reach the mountaintop you realise there are more mountaintops. And you don’t know what else to chase if it didn’t bring the fulfillment you’d anticipated.

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.

The biblical David had everything - a kingdom, wealth, military victories, multiple wives. And yet he lusted after Bathsheba, another man's wife. He destroyed lives to possess what he envied.

What you already have becomes invisible when you fixate on what others possess.

The fractal descends endlessly. You can always find smaller distinctions, finer gradations, new hierarchies to measure yourself against.

The only escapes are being at the very top or very bottom, and even then you'll likely find someone doing better or worse. The trophies on the plinths are empty vessels that rattle in the wind.