Envy, The Root Cause of Unhappiness

Thou Shalt Not Covet, for Gratitude Will Turn What You Have Into Enough

“Enough is as good as a feast.” — Sir Thomas Malory

Imagine the secretary problem: you are trying to hire the best secretary out of n rankable candidates and can only make a hiring decision immediately after the interview, which are held one by one in a random, non-reversible order. This means that every candidate will be benchmarked against the quality of all previous interviews, and that you can not recall a candidate you regret not hiring. No matter who you end up hiring, your obvious dilemma is, “what if the secretary I hired is not the best?”

A glimpse at your neighbour’s secretary probably exacerbates that concern: “do they have a better secretary than me? What was their hiring strategy? How do I re-hire a better secretary?”

The secretary dilemma describes most of life, existentially. We know that death is inevitable, and we know that time does not flow backwards. Naturally, we optimize for the best (after all, we live just once). Often times, when we are caught up in the perpetual…