A friend’s promotion, a stranger’s holiday, a classmate’s new house. Social media lets us compare ourselves with hundreds of people before breakfast. Envy is ancient, but it has never had so much to feed on.
Epictetus asks: someone was invited to a dinner and you weren't. Fine — but they paid the price of the invitation, perhaps in flattery or favours. Lettuce is sold for a coin; if you don't pay the coin, you can't expect the lettuce. Others' rewards usually came at prices you might not have wanted to pay.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 25
“Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.”Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930), ch. 6
Russell's point: comparison has no top. If you measure yourself against others, someone will always be ahead, even of an emperor. His cure is to enjoy what you have for its own sake, rather than for how it ranks.
Illustration: mudita: practising gladness at someone else’s good fortune
Buddhism names envy's opposite: mudita, sympathetic joy, the gladness we feel at another's happiness. It is one of the four “divine abodes” and can be trained like a muscle, by deliberately wishing well to the very people we envy.
“He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.”Tao Te Ching 33
The Tao Te Ching returns again and again to contentment: knowing when you have enough, and the freedom that brings. Comparison looks outward; Laozi asks us to look in.
Go deeper: Know Thyself, a six-day journey, or loving-kindness meditation.
Russell, The Conquest of Happiness · Muditā on Wikipedia · Epictetus
