We don’t have to be jealous to notice it – we’re trying to make sense of fairness and what it looks like. As we grow up, the stories we tell ourselves about other people become subtler, more personal, and often morally weighted. Epictetus advises us to stop outsourcing our sense of value to other people and to the things we can’t control. How can we change if we don’t even know who we are?Opens in new window ]Comparison does have a valuable function. What matters to Epictetus is not what anyone else is doing, but whether we ourselves are attending to things we can control.

Source: The Irish Times January 05, 2026 18:01 UTC