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These feelings of deprivation may not look so peculiar, however, once we consider the psychology behind the way we decide what is enough. Our sense of an appropriate limit to anything - for example. to wealth and esteem - is never decided independently. It is arrived at by comparing our condition with that of a reference group, with that of people we consider to be our equals. We cannot appreciate what we have in isolation, or judged against the lives of our medieval forebears…We will take ourselves to be fortunate only when we have as much as, or a little more than, the people we grow up with, work alongside, have as friends and identify with in the public realm.
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Given the vast inequalities we are daily confronted with, perhaps the most notable feature of envy is that we manage not to envy everyone. There are people whose enormous blessings leave us wholly untroubled, others whose minor advantages act as sources of relentless torment. We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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