The News: A User's Manual

Envy

For a rich guy with a private jet and a million-dollar sports car, Elon Musk is unusually quiet and shy. He is tall, with long arms and big hands and a boyish face that often looks distracted; you can tell the wheels inside his head never quite stop spinning. Before he founded SpaceX in 2002, Musk created two Internet companies: Zip2, which he sold to Compaq in 1999 for $307 million in cash, and PayPal, which went public shortly before being sold to eBay. Musk, the largest shareholder, was 30 years old.

Wired

1.

THE WEEKEND CAN be the time for the softer bits of news: the colour supplements, the tech, design and media blogs, the style sections and the interview and profile pieces. This is where we may learn, over the course of an hour or so of browsing, about the twenty-five-year-old chef who runs four successful seafood restaurants in Lower Manhattan, about the fashion label started up by the daughter of a well-known film director, about the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has set up an online university backed by $1 billion in Qatari venture capital money, about the revered German artist at work on his own museum in Berlin and about the former Wall Street banker who is about to open twenty boutique hotels across China – all of this on a morning that began with a sense of inner ease, calm and dedication to domestic goals, with the sun filtering through the curtains and the sound of birds in the garden outside.

2.

WE LIVE IN an age unlike any other in the extent to which it foregrounds the idea of individual opportunity. For most of history, we lived and died on the same rung of the social ladder. Our parents’ occupations determined our own. Prospects for betterment did not exist. Financial markets were primitive and capital not easily available. Technological discoveries came along every 200 years, and political change even less frequently.

Now, as the news attests with its constant stories of initiative, perseverance, toil and self-realization, there are theoretically no limits to what anyone can achieve. Everything is – allegedly – possible for the creative and the tenacious. Right now, across the continents, the cleverest ones among us are finding ingenious ways to raise money, draft scripts, invent formulae and design machines that will change the fundamentals of existence. A contented resignation to a modest condition has come to seem not only a grave error, but possibly a sign of mental illness.

In response to the stories of achievement it places before us, the news invites us to feel content and mature: quietly pleased by the tycoon’s success, impressed by the entrepreneur’s initiative, thoughtfully interested in the artist’s global fame. News organizations that otherwise warn us of the damaging side effects of strobe lighting, nudity or profane language see no need to prepare us for the potentially problematic consequences of witnessing the success of others. They expect us to be grateful for the haphazard selection of victors that they have, this week like all others, worked so hard to parade before us. They imply that we might sit around the kitchen table on a Saturday morning good-naturedly taking in information about these titans without registering any particularly harmful or troubling after-thoughts, simply a broad sense of delight at the sheer genius and resourcefulness of mankind.

3.

BUT INSTEAD, DEEP down, some of us are likely to be caving in under the pressure of envy, feeling the ache of our tragically ignored and soon-to-be-forgotten egos in a world of apparently infinite possibility. Beneath an impassive surface, we may be in agony over the contrast between the hopes that were once invested in us and the reality of what we have done with our lives, the difference between what others our own age (and even some much younger) have shown themselves capable of achieving and the trivial accomplishments to which our hesitant, timid and directionless selves can lay claim. While this might be cause enough for some moments of touching melancholy, after a certain point even self-pity ceases to be interesting.

Existential panic may not, of course, seem like the most reasonable reaction to an upbeat, glossily illustrated feature entitled ‘Silicon Valley’s Top Twenty Investors’, but after scanning such a story, we may nevertheless come perilously close to hurling the supplement to one side, banging our fists on the table and, with an anguished sob, screaming at a world that doesn’t care (or at our surprised spouse, in the act of preparing lunch), ‘I can’t take being me any more!’

4.

THE NEWS SHOULD help us with our feelings. It shouldn’t pretend that it is normal to present an audience with repeated evidence of the accomplishments of the most energetic and inventive members of the species and not expect that people will be driven a little crazy as a result. It should admit that it takes an exceptionally unimaginative person to read of someone of their own age and gender who has bought and sold businesses, consorted with the mighty and attracted the attention of millions – and in response, experience only a broad and serene pleasure. It should be generous enough to recognize that we urgently need help in understanding, interpreting and living with the envy it so regularly unleashes upon its unsuspecting and undefended consumers.

5.

WHILE ENVY HAS always been a target of fierce and moralistic criticism, it is also an indispensable feature of a decent life. It is a call to action that should be heeded, for it contains garbled messages sent by muddled but important parts of our personalities about what we should be doing with the rest of our lives. Listening to envy should help us to take painful yet necessary steps towards becoming who we really are.

Instead of trying to repress our envy, we should therefore make every effort to study it. Each person we envy possesses some piece of the jigsaw puzzle depicting our possible future condition. There is a portrait of our ‘true self’ waiting to be assembled out of the envious hints we receive when we flick through a magazine, turn the pages of a newspaper or hear updates on the radio about the latest career moves of our old schoolmates. Though we might at first experience envy as humiliating and a confirmation of our own failure, we should calmly ask one essential and redemptive question of all those we envy: ‘What could I learn here?’ It is a pity that envious reactions are so often confusingly vague and accompanied by panic. We start to envy certain individuals in their entirety, when in fact, if we took a moment to analyse their lives calmly, we would realize that it is only a small part of what they have done that really resonates with, and should guide, our own next steps.

6.

WE NEVER ENVY another’s achievement more than when we know very little about how it was attained. If news organizations were kinder, rather than simply describing the triumphs of others as mysterious faits accomplis, they would expend copious energy on analysing precisely what went into them. They would present the stories of successful people principally as case studies that we could understand and practically emulate rather than simply, as at present, either admire blankly or resent.

7.

THERE ARE OF course limits to the uses of envy. Too many random reminders of other people’s success may simply terrify us into inactivity and unwittingly prevent us from putting any single plan into practice. In order to achieve anything on our own, we need to be free for extended stretches from the psychological pressures exerted by news of others’ feats. We require periods of inner seclusion and calm if we are ever going to finish off something worthwhile: that is, something that we may ourselves one day be envied for.

The news should also help us by reminding us of statistical realities. While the supplements may be continuously filled with success stories, success itself will always remain highly anomalous, achieved by no more than a few thousand out of many millions – a detail that the editors of the news carefully (and sadistically) keep carefully out of our imaginations.

In contrast to what the news suggests, most businesses in fact fail, most films don’t get made, most careers are not stellar, most people’s faces and bodies are less than perfectly beautiful and almost everyone is sad and worried a lot of the time. We shouldn’t lament our own condition just because it doesn’t measure up against a deeply unrealistic benchmark, or hate ourselves solely for our inability to defy some breathtaking odds.

After we’ve explored envy as thoroughly as we can, we should be offered a chance to feel collectively distraught over, rather than individually persecuted for, how little we have been able to achieve.