winning by Vincent H. '23

for most of my life i was very prone to envy. part of that was because of the academic environment i was raised in – other people doing well on math contests meant i would have a worse rank, other people getting into top colleges meant i would have a harder time doing so myself, and so on – but it also extended to non-academic endeavors as well. for instance, i remember feeling little pangs of resentment whenever one of my friends found a new friend group that they began spending lots of time with, or whenever someone i knew joined twitter and acquired more followers than me seemingly without much effort

now i understand that these kinds of events are often blessings in disguise. friends joining new groups can be a good way for you to meet new people, having acquaintances with lots of twitter followers is great for your own account because occasionally those people will like your tweets and amplify them to a larger audience, and so on. i have a bad habit where i tend to assume at first that most landscapes are competitive and zero-sum and lately i’ve been realizing this is rarely the case

this became really clear to me around a year ago when i was hanging out with a close friend and we were talking about our problems, and then suddenly i recognized that their troubles regularly bled over into my life and their victories regularly uplifted me, and of all the things they could do as a friend to make me feel better there was perhaps nothing more impactful than if they conquered their own demons. in that moment i realized that i wanted nothing more than for my friend’s life to be as good as possible, for them to move past all their insecurity and indecisiveness and become the person they were trying to be. that was the first time i understood that my life is extremely aligned with other peoples’, far more than i’d previously thought

after realizing that i felt very stupid and very guilty. stupid for having taken twenty years to arrive at the realization; guilty because i wondered if me taking so long meant that i was a bad person. i wondered how my friends overcame their jealousy and found their way to being genuinely supportive of others – has everyone else always been like this since they were a child? or was it taught to them, and if so, when and how and by whom?

i’ve never explicitly voiced these questions before, because i was worried that perhaps i was alone and whoever i asked would realize i was a terrible or selfish person. nowadays i am less worried about that because i believe i have friends who will be forgiving of my past, and that’s why i feel comfortable writing this post

my current view is that there is a lot of work to do in the world and there are a lot of problems to solve, and we win when everyone wins. i don’t know most of the people i walk past each day, but whatever they’re trying to accomplish, i hope they do a good job, and i hope they grow in the ways they want to grow in and become the best possible versions of themselves. even if their success doesn’t affect me directly, at the very least it’ll make for more interesting conversation down the line if i ever talk to them

and yes of course there are exceptions, of course there are conflicts of interest, of course there are people with antithetical values and priorities, but i choose to believe that most people do not fall into those categories, that my life is positively correlated with the lives of most people around me

i don’t mean to suggest that i’m immune to jealousy now. there’s a popular model of the brain where you have a system 1 which provides fast, impulsive reactions to stimuli and a system 2 which provides slower, more thoughtful responses, and while my system 2 is much cleaner than it used to be there’s definitely still a lot of jealousy in my system 1 – occasionally when something good happens to someone i know, one of my initial gut reactions will still be a negative one. i don’t know if this is true for everyone or just me, and i don’t know if this is possible to change deliberately on my part (i think we’ve probably evolved jealousy as an instinctual response in these situations and that seems hard to eliminate), but at this point it’s not something i worry about anymore. i know that i’m a healthier person than i used to be, and i don’t think purity of thought is a realistic goal to beat myself up over