The Quiet Thief: How Envy Steals Our Joy
- Casey Silveria
- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
Growing up on a farm in Idaho, I learned early that other families had more. Nicer trucks in the school parking lot. Better clothes on the first day back. Kids who talked about vacations while I was left kicking rocks on the farm.
I didn’t have a word for what I felt then. I just knew the weight of it. That quiet math of looking around and coming up short.
Years later, after managing capital in volatile, high-stakes environments, I found the word researching behavioral finance. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner and a man who built a billion-dollar fortune, was asked what actually drives human behavior around money.
His answer surprised me.
“The world is not driven by greed,” Munger said. “It’s driven by envy.”
Something clicked. That weight I carried as a kid watching those trucks roll by? It was never about the trucks. It was about the comparison. The numbers weren’t the problem. The reference point was.
Greed Wants More. Envy Wants What’s Theirs.
That distinction matters more than it sounds.
Greed says: “I want more money.” Envy says: “I want their money.” One points inward to your own appetite. The other points outward to comparison. And comparison, it turns out, is the silent architect of most financial anxiety.
In a 1998 paper in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, economists Sara Solnick and David Hemenway showed that many people prefer lower absolute income if it means higher status relative to peers.
They tested this with a simple choice: Would you rather earn $50,000 while your peers earn $25,000, or earn $100,000 while your peers earn $200,000?
Half chose the lower salary. They’d forgo doubling their salary if it meant having more than the people around them.
That finding has stayed with me. It explains something I see often in client conversations: a lot of the stress people feel around money has very little to do with the numbers themselves. It comes from who they’re comparing themselves to.
And here’s the thing. Most of us don’t choose that comparison set on purpose. It gets shaped quietly by headlines, social media, neighbors, and stories we never signed up for. Your brother-in-law’s kitchen renovation. A college friend’s promotion on LinkedIn. The seemingly effortless lifestyle of a stranger on Instagram.
When the comparison set shifts, satisfaction shifts with it. Even if nothing changes in your actual financial life. That’s why it can feel like you’re doing fine one moment and falling behind the next, without a clear reason. The numbers didn’t move. The reference point did.
The Paradox Munger Saw
Munger pointed out something that should be obvious but rarely feels true: by almost any material standard, we’re all dramatically better off than previous generations. Medicine, technology, transportation, safety. The improvements are staggering when measured against even fifty years ago.
“The fact that everybody’s five times better off than they used to be, they take that for granted,” he observed. “All they think about is somebody else has more now, and it’s not fair that he should have it and they don’t.”
This is the engine of envy. Unlike greed, which at least has a theoretical endpoint, envy is infinite. There will always be someone with more. Someone whose kids go to the better school. Someone whose retirement came earlier. Someone whose portfolio had a better year.
I know this pattern from the inside. That farm kid watching other families pull up in nicer trucks? He wasn’t struggling in any absolute sense. We had food, shelter, a working operation. What I had was a comparison problem, and no framework for seeing it clearly.
Building a Circuit Breaker
At Silveria Wealth Group, we think about investment management as building a system with structural integrity. Every dollar gets assigned a specific job: Growth, Income, Reserves, Inflation Protection, or Diversification. Each role operates under a set of rules designed to remove emotion from the equation.
We call this a “behavioral circuit breaker.” When markets get volatile, the rules govern. Not headlines. Not fear. And certainly not envy of what someone else’s portfolio might be doing.
But the deeper work isn’t about portfolio construction. It’s about recognizing that the emotional volatility most people feel around money is often triggered by comparison, not by actual financial circumstances. The system provides discipline.
The awareness is designed to provide perspective; however, no strategy can guarantee emotional or financial outcomes.
I built this framework partly because I needed it myself. That farm kid who watched others have more is still in here. The difference now is that I can see the pattern for what it is.
The “Mr. Market” Trap
One place this pattern shows up often: the comparison to “Mr. Market.”
Clients will review a quarter and feel like they’re falling behind because their portfolio didn’t match the S&P 500. But the S&P 500 isn’t a neutral benchmark. It’s heavily concentrated in technology, and it reflects zero consideration of your actual life: your timeline, your income needs, your capacity for risk, your sleep.
Comparing a diversified portfolio to a tech-heavy index is like comparing your farm truck to a sports car. They’re simply built for different jobs. One isn’t behind the other. They’re just not the same vehicle.
The real benchmark is personal. Did the portfolio do what it was designed to do?
Are you still on track for the goals that matter to you? Is the system intact?
That’s a harder question to sit with, because it requires knowing what you actually want, separate from what the headlines say you should have earned.
One Question Worth Sitting With
If there’s a money decision on your mind right now, whether a purchase, an investment, or a career move, here’s a question worth asking:
Who am I comparing myself to, and is that the right comparison set for me?
You don’t need to do anything with the answer right now. Just asking the question often takes the edge off. It separates what you actually want from what you think you should want because someone else has it.
Most of us won’t reach comlete equanimity. But we can get better at noticing when the comparison set has hijacked our thinking.
We can build systems, both financial and mental, that create space between stimulus and response. Between seeing what someone else has and feeling like we’re falling behind.
That kid on the farm, watching the nicer trucks roll by? He wasn’t behind. He just couldn’t see it yet.
That’s not just good investing. That’s a good life.
Casey Silveria is the founder of Silveria Wealth Group, LLC, a fee-only fiduciary investment adviser based in Boise, Idaho. SWG applies the Roles & Rules (R&R Investing) framework to build systematic investment engines designed for structural integrity.
Sources
Solnick, S. J., & Hemenway, D. (1998). Is more always better?: A survey on positional concerns. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 37(3), 373–383.
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