Treating Another Person’s Success as Evidence of Your Failure

Jealousy gets worse when you start thinking someone else’s success leaves less for you.

Someone gets the promotion, and you feel like you lost. Someone buys the house, and you feel behind. Someone you know publishes a book, and suddenly the manuscript sitting untouched on your laptop feels like evidence that you have wasted your life.

Somewhere underneath it is the idea that life is a ranking system. If someone moves up, you feel like you’ve moved down.

That logic makes sense in a race. It makes much less sense in ordinary life.

Your friend’s marriage does not make your relationship worse. Your colleague’s promotion does not reduce your competence. Your sibling’s income does not automatically shrink your bank account.

Research on personal relative deprivation by Kim and colleagues found that people tend to compare their financial standing with better-off people they perceive as similar to themselves, with perceived relative disadvantage associated with greater resentment. You can see this clearly in families, where achievements can become strangely competitive.

One sibling buys a house, and another suddenly feels behind. Then a cousin’s child gets into a prestigious university, and somebody else’s dinner turns into an impromptu performance review of their entire parenting career.

Nobody planned the competition. Everyone somehow entered it.

Someone else’s promotion doesn’t mean your life got worse. Your jealousy just makes it feel that way.