The thief of joy

I know a guy—let’s call him Steve. In one way, he’s my peer. We are both ministers. Both pretty active online. Both have newsletters. Both are on the very progressive end of our respective denominations. Both have reach and influence. In the circles we share, we are both known and respected for our positions.

But Steve has additional marks of success. He has served in a very high-profile role in his denomination, whereas mine barely knows I exist. He goes on international humanitarian trips and writes about them. I barely go to the suburbs, have only been out of the country one time, and my passport is currently expired. He has written books, probably five or six of them. I only recently published my first one.

In my head, I think of him as successful at all of this “being a public person” stuff, and I don’t think that way of myself at all. In my head, he is a successful writer, and I am not. Not because of anything I know, but because of the story I have written about him in my head.

Theodore Roosevelt once said that comparison is the thief of joy. He was onto something, I think. In truth, comparing myself to Steve is not a fair comparison. Because I know all the chaos and struggle that goes on in my head, all the times I catch myself slacking off, all the ways I let myself down, and with Steve, I only see the final results. I see his outsides and compare it to my insides.

I know this intellectually, but it doesn’t matter—not really. Deep inside, most of the time I am still convinced Steve has a better life and is more successful than I am.

It’s also worth noting that for all the ways our situations are similar, there are significant ways they are not. He has generational family financial resources that I do not have. His spouse works a professional job that provides health insurance for his family. My spouse is disabled and on Medicare.

Steve and I have another difference, too. He recently wrote a blog post about his writing, and it turns out that I make about three times more from my writing than he does from his writing.

Huh. Freakin’ Steve, man.

Steve isn’t the only one—he’s just a recent example. As a child growing up in a poor household in the 80s, I was taught by everyone, both implicitly and explicitly, to be deeply dissatisfied with the way my life was, and that my goal in life should be to improve it, to make it better. I was a child of Reaganomics, of greed is good, of the era that made Trump a household name and a source of aspiration. Titans of industry like Lee Iacocca and Jack Welch were household names.

I spent my twenties working in financial sales trying to get that life, and then my early thirties trying to get away from it. It would be the unhoused, the addicted, and the mentally ill who saved my soul as well as my life, and who ultimately showed me the way out.

But not all envy is about money, and not all the ways our society measures prestige have dollar signs attached. Which is why I can sell more books than Steve and still find myself jealous of his life.