You can enjoy the highest quality of life in human history but still be miserable if you are envious. Jimmy Carr explains:
We’re living better than 99.9 percent of the people who ever walked the earth. We enjoy hot showers, modern medicine, instant communication, endless entertainment, and children who almost always survive infancy.
Yet many of us still feel dissatisfied. He calls it “life dysmorphia.” We quickly adapt to extraordinary comforts—the hedonic treadmill at work—and then measure our lives against those who seem to have more. Instead of comparing ourselves to the past, we compare ourselves to our neighbors, celebrities, and influencers, undermining our own happiness despite living in an age of unprecedented abundance.
As he puts it: happiness = quality of life minus envy.
Envy is a deadly addiction. It’s Marxist meth, the narcotic of nihilists. It turns abundance into scarcity, gratitude into resentment, and opportunity into grievance.
This landed. I've spent twenty-five years as a financial planner, and I can tell you Carr's formula holds all the way to the top. I sit with families who have more than almost anyone who has ever lived, and envy still finds its way through the door — abundance doesn't cure it, it just raises the bar for the next comparison.
What actually helps isn't trading the sideways comparison (the neighbors) for the backward one (the past). It's setting the measuring stick down altogether. The only honest comparison is to who you were yesterday. Gratitude isn't the enemy of ambition either — it's the soil ambition grows in.
Thank you for naming "life dysmorphia." I'll be borrowing that, with credit. Looking forward to Part 2.