Cause of misjudgment № 8
Envy/Jealousy Tendency
Comparing ourselves to others breeds envy — a powerful, miserable driver of behavior that, unlike other vices, brings no pleasure at all.
“Envy is a really stupid sin because it's the only one you could never possibly have any fun at.”— Charlie Munger
Munger thought envy was one of the most underrated forces in the world and one of the most foolish. We are wired to measure our well-being not in absolute terms but relative to the people around us — our neighbor, our coworker, our brother-in-law. As a result, someone can have everything they need and still be made miserable by a peer who has slightly more. Munger liked to point out that this drives far more of human conflict than greed does.
The everyday version is the worker who was perfectly satisfied with a raise until they learned a colleague got a bigger one, at which point the raise feels like an insult. Nothing about their own situation changed; only the comparison did. The same mechanism fuels destructive behavior in families, companies, and even nations, where parties will harm their own interests to deny an advantage to a rival.
What made Munger especially scornful of envy is that it is the one deadly sin with no upside — gluttony has the meal, lust has the affair, but envy is pure suffering with nothing to show for it. His practical counsel was simply to refuse to play: stop measuring your life against other people’s, and treat envy, along with resentment and self-pity, as a habit of mind to be ruthlessly avoided because it poisons the person who indulges it without harming its target.
