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‘Every Time a Friend Succeeds, I Die a Little’: Envy and Creativity
“Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Or their success.
By human nature we compare ourselves to others. We’re social creatures, and social creatures create a pecking order, so we tend to rank ourselves against others’ achievements because our brain is wired to figure out where we fit into the scheme of things. Unfortunately, we usually find someone who is doing better than us, which isn’t hard to do because there is always someone doing better than us. Another’s good fortune can quickly become one of the most powerful and dangerous forces in the universe.
“Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little,” said Gore Vidal.
That’s true for too many. I remember one disturbingly piquant moment in 2010 when I stepped into an airport newsstand to get a magazine for my flight and spotted a photo of an erudite, authorial Jonathan Franzen on the cover of Time magazine along with the headline “Great American Novelist.”
Franzen was roughly my age, also from the Midwest, and I’d been tracking his ascent as a novelist for years. I’d read his writing, and I liked it well enough, admired it on certain levels, but I didn’t love it. Still, because he garnered such gushing attention, I measured the arc of my…
