Cabin Fever
I read a piece by Shalom Auslander on the Dangers of Substack for the Chronically Low Self-Esteemed recently. The piece is from Aug ‘23 but it’s timeless nonetheless.
Auslander explores his envy via George Saunders’ literal cabin (and retreats) as a symbol for Saunders’ relative success. Somewhere in his particularly vulgar and entertaining writing style, you can tease out partial attribution of the envy to just being a writer. I think it’s deeper than that.
Comparison to the most extreme right tail is just part of being a person. It’s really easy to compare oneself to the most successful ideal outcome - we’re pretty well attuned to what that could be.
Maybe Shalom can be better at suppressing the envy, maybe he can’t.
I say it’s not even worth the effort.
Better to just take the emotion and speedrun through it. I feel peace if I can quickly get through the following questions and get back to life:
- are they more successful?
- are they satisfied?
- am I good at what I do?
- am I satisfied?
- Will I ever be satisfied?
- what would get me there?
I bet there’s a strong correlation of envy to cabin fever. When you’re stuck inside or in isolation more often, you have way more time to compare yourself to others.
I don’t want to sound like a self-help book, but my best bet is that if Shalom leaves Panera and gets more exposure to the world outside of the cabin, he’ll worry less about whether his follow count is high enough.