Progress is a curious thing. It’s the story of humanity moving forward—electricity lighting up our nights, medicine keeping us alive, machines doing the heavy lifting, and air conditioning making the unbearable summer a thing of the past. By all measures, we’re living in an age of abundance, where even our poor have access to comforts that would have seemed miraculous mere decades ago.
Despite all this progress, there’s a shadow that follows close behind: envy. The more we advance, the more we compare, and the more we compare, the more we feel we’re falling behind. Envy doesn’t thrive on scarcity; it thrives on abundance. It’s not that we don’t have enough—it’s that someone else always seems to have more.
A hundred years ago, the battles were straightforward: survival, food on the table, and keeping the roof over your head. Today, the fight isn’t about survival but about status, recognition, and keeping up with the Joneses—who, by the way, just bought a new electric car and posted their vacation photos from the Maldives.
Social media turbocharges envy like never before. We’re bombarded with images of other people’s highlight reels, curated to perfection. It doesn’t matter if their reality is far messier than the picture suggests; envy doesn’t care about the truth. It only cares that they have something you don’t. Social media is doubtless fueling a mental health crisis for many.
And it’s not just individuals. Entire industries fuel the flames. Advertising whispers that you’re incomplete without the latest gadget, the most stylish wardrobe, or the perfect home. Politics leverages envy to divide us, spinning narratives of “us vs. them.” Meanwhile, the world’s richest spend on extravagances—watches, cars, private jets—often not for the joy of owning them, but for the envy they provoke.
Here lies the great irony of progress: we’ve never had it better, but we’ve also never been more dissatisfied. Our ancestors lived harder, shorter lives, but they didn’t have the constant reminder of what they didn’t have. They didn’t wake up to an Instagram feed showing them a better life, just out of reach.
Envy is corrosive. It doesn’t push us to grow or innovate—it traps us in a cycle of resentment and bitterness. And yet, it’s part of human nature, embedded in us from the beginning. Even the old commandments warned against it, recognizing the harm it could do to a community, a family, a person’s soul.
The solution isn’t simple, but it’s necessary: to shift our focus from what’s missing to what we already have. Gratitude might sound cliché, but it’s the antidote to envy. It’s what allows us to look at progress—not as a measure of what others have, but as a testament to how far we’ve all come.
Progress has given us much, but envy threatens to rob us of the joy it brings. The challenge of our age isn’t just to keep moving forward but to find contentment in the journey and recognize that the real treasure isn’t what someone else has—it’s what we choose to appreciate in our own lives.
Ah, the great secret to life, so plain and unvarnished it might as well be written on the back of a barn door: it ain’t about piling up more, but finding the grace to be glad with less. A simpler formula, you’ll not find, yet folks keep complicating it as if misery were the prize.
The simple formula for happiness in life, is not to have more, but to happy with what you have.