Town Mouse
Dr Johnson once wrote a poem called The Vanity of Human Wishes.
In it, he looks at what we now call ‘comparison sickness’ and what was then called simply ‘envy’:
‘There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail,
‘Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.’
‘Assail’ is the right word. It’s a condition of living in the city that you are assailed, as Johnson says, by envymaking images and words on all sides. Strolling down Shaftesbury Avenue, you see the name of a university actor pal up in lights. Writers will be familiar with the sinking feeling that accompanies examination of a bookshop’s window display. Your books aren’t visible; your schoolfriend’s are piled high. And the people outside the pubs look so well dressed and young.
Then a friend tells you that a mutual acquaintance who joined a merchant bank – which you thought at the time was an irredeemably boring choice of career – has just retired aged 46. Another friend of a friend, the former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, has moved to Palo Alto to work for Facebook, for millions.
Meanwhile, strangers flaunt their wealth. The bike route to my office takes me through that crazy Monaco of London, Notting Hill. Each morning, I am assailed by bankers’ wives driving ostentatious, black Range Rovers to the shops and the sight of basements being dug out for extra staff rooms and swimming pools. I sometimes allow myself a moment of envy before remembering what a corrosive emotion it is.
It isn’t just Johnson’s ‘scholars’ who feel the stings of envy. Comparison sickness afflicts everyone, especially the rich, who are even more troubled by comparisons than the middling sort. A banker’s ex-girlfriend recently wrote that she was staying on a massive yacht in the Mediterranean owned by a friend of her erstwhile partner. But the owner of this yacht was miserable. ‘How can I be happy with that next door?’ he complained, pointing to the even bigger yacht moored alongside, owned by Roman Abramovich.
Even David Bowie said he was periodically affected by envy, when seeing that a contemporary was at number one. ‘It’s human nature,’ he observed on a chat show.
When we lived on Exmoor, and breathed purer air in distant fields, I was rarely troubled by such negative emotions. In the country, people had a different set of values. Life was to be lived well and people didn’t seem to care about cars, clothes or holidays. It wasn’t about how much you had but who you were. Epicurus recommended moving out of the city: you would be safer from the darts of envy city living produces. The bare necessities of life – food, beer – are easy to get hold of, he said. It’s the vain trifles – champagne and a chauffeur-driven limo – that are hard to get.
In an essay on sleep, which he calls the ‘nectar of oblivion’, Dr Johnson wrote of the absurdity of envy: ‘All envy would be extinguished if it were universally known that there are none to be envied,’ he wrote. Everybody has his or her problems and worries.
It’s best to have no desire for all the consumer rubbish in the first place. Expensive cars, yachts and big houses hold no special attraction for me. They’re all a lot of extra work and hassle. Far better to keep things simple and create a lot of leisure time for yourself. Free time is really the greatest luxury, and to get that is a matter of careful planning and organisation, not just more money. The rich are fond of saying, ‘I’m cash-rich but time-poor.’
Socrates said, ‘What a lot of things I don’t need!’ when he surveyed the stuff on sale on the market in Athens. Following in his footsteps, I test myself periodically by flicking through the Argos catalogue. I pass the test if I look at every one of its hundreds of pages and remain untempted by any of the gewgaws on offer.
We members of the middling class can also comfort ourselves with the fact that the rich, like the poor, worry about money all the time. When you are poor, you can think of little else because you have not got enough. But the rich grow paranoid about losing their lucre, and they quickly become surrounded by a load of flatterers, all trying to relieve them of a part of their fortune.
Another downside of being rich is that you have a long way to fall: who would want to be in the shoes of Philip Green or Neil Woodford today?
The problem of envy is exacerbated by social media, as pop singer Madonna, who has clearly been reading Epicurus, explained recently. ‘You get caught up in comparing yourself to other people. Should I be like that; act like that; look like that? Will that make me more popular, or more successful? People are a slave to winning others’ approval.’
Madonna has yet to follow her own advice. She has 14 million Twitter followers, which is 14 million more than me. I have precisely none, and I am very happy that way.
‘The rich, like the poor, worry about money all the time’