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1) This has evidently been out for a year, but it just made its way to me. The short piece has an obnoxious title, but its essence is reasonably serious: don't allow you happiness to be defeated by others' success. https://www.becomingminimalist.com/someone-has-more/
2) What is right about this? As a philosophy of life, it's often self-destructive to define our happiness in relative terms to others. There will always be others with more of whatever we might value -- money, power, attention, etc.
3) This is why ancient civilizations condemned the vice of "pleonexia," the insatiable desire for more of whatever it is we might want. This Greek term, discussed in depth in Plato, Aristotle, and the Bible, is translated typically as "greed, though the Greek term works better.
4) This concept was refined in important ways by Rousseau in his discussion of amour-propre, who focuses on the necessarily comparative dimensions of this vice. We tend to define our social selves and our happiness only in comparison with others.
5) For Rousseau, while amour-propre can be refined in positive ways, it is nevertheless playing with fire. It is at its core a powerfully destructive impulse that constantly threatens to dissolve society, as it is necessarily zero-sum.
6) For Rousseau, so long as we live in society, we are impelled to compare ourselves to others and define ourselves in relative terms. The only real way to rid ourselves of amour-propre is to return to the state of nature, which he says is impossible.
7) Which takes us to what is wrong with this short essay. It assumes that we can simply tell people not to compare themselves with others, as if that were possible for the vast majority of us. If Rousseau teaches us anything, it's that such a gesture is laughably impossible.
8) So what's left to do? Rousseau leaves us with a couple of options. First, we can compare ourselves to one another on things that really matter: rather than comparing our wealth, we should compare our contributions to the republic.
9) Second, and relatedly, we can get away from frivolous comparisons of wealth by reducing inequality. That is, we have to get economic inequality under control. So long as it's out of control, this is inevitably how people will measure themselves.
10) But I guess my real point is this: let's not pretend we can simply tell everyone in society not to notice radical inequality. Yes, getting upset about it may be irrational and self-destructive. But it's nevertheless more or less hardwired into us.
11) Telling someone that it's wrong to get up about inequality is like telling someone it's wrong to get upset about a spouse's infidelity. Yes, a jealous rage is irrational and self-destructive.
12) But it hardly does any good to tell the aggrieved spouse that he/she's acting irrationally. The emotional response is more or less hardwired.
13) What would make sense would be to tell the couple to work on their marriage before it comes to this, which would prevent the infidelity and the subsequent jealous rage.
14) Similarly, if we can learn anything about these matters from folks like Rousseau, we would do better to address the envious rages of the relative poor by tending to inequality before it gets out of hand.
