4N INVESTIG4TION INTO THE POLITIC4L ECONOMY OF ENVY

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If you still believe that casually observing your neighbour's grass is a merely decorative phenomenon of human experience, allow me to disillusion you. We are faced with one of the most sophisticatedly perverse psychic mechanisms ever developed by civilisation — a socially sanctioned system of self-flagellation that transforms the experience of others into a distorted mirror of our own inadequacy.

This is not an article about gardening. It is an anthropological dissection of why we insist on measuring our existential backyards with someone else's ruler, while our own flowers wither from comparative neglect.

Genealogy of a Malady: From Greek Agoras to Algorithmic Feeds

The so-called ‘chronic comparison syndrome’ is not a contemporary invention. Its philosophical DNA dates back to Socratic restlessness, but it was with Plato that it acquired precise metaphysical contours. In his theory of Forms, sensible reality is always an imperfect copy of an unattainable ideal — a cognitive structure that paved the way for us to always perceive the ‘other’ as the bearer of a realisation that eludes us.

Aristotle, more pragmatic, located eudaimonia in the fulfilment of one's own function (ergon), not in the contemplation of others' triumphs. His mistake was to underestimate the seduction of spectacle — human beings seem programmed to prefer the theatre of others' excellence to the silent work of self-realisation.

The Stoics (Epictetus, Seneca) identified the core of the problem: we attribute moral value to what is beyond our control. The grass of others, by definition, belongs to the category of ‘indifferent things’ (adiaphora). The perverse genius of modern comparison lies precisely in transforming the indifferent into a disguised categorical imperative.

Psychoanalysis: The Lawn as a Field of Projection

Freud, of course, sexualised the issue. His ‘castration complex’ offers a disturbing interpretative key: we see in the other not what they possess, but what we imagine we lack constitutively.

The greener grass would then be the floating signifier of a primordial lack that we project onto our neighbour as a way of giving coherence to our own incompleteness. Lacan radicalised this: ‘Desire is the desire of the Other.’ We do not desire the object itself, but the position of those who seem to have conquered it.

The green grass is not botanical — it is a symptom. We desire less the grass than the admiration we imagine is bestowed upon its owner. We are, in Lacanian words, ‘signifying beings’ imprisoned in a libidinal economy where value is always relational, never intrinsic.

Philosophy of Resentment: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche

Schopenhauer, the systematic pessimist, saw comparison as the engine of infinite suffering. His metaphor of the hedgehog — which needs warmth but hurts itself when it gets close — applies perfectly: we approach others in search of validation, but each comparison pierces us with needles of inadequacy.

Nietzsche offered a diagnosis and an antidote. He diagnosed the ‘slave morality’ that transforms the inability to have into a virtue of non-valuation. His antidote: amor fati (love of fate) and the will to power. Comparison, for Nietzsche, is a symptom of weakness — of the inability to create one's own values. The strong neighbour does not compare his lawn; he cultivates it according to his own aesthetic, even if it seems barren to the eyes of others.

The Social Machine of Envy: Byung-Chul Han and Self-Exploitation

Contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han has provided the vocabulary for our era: the ‘performance society.’ We no longer live under Foucault's disciplinary paradigm of ‘must not.’ We live under the tyranny of ‘can’ — the neurotic obligation to realise all potential.

The grass of others, in our feeds, is not shown as an obligation, but as a possibility. And here lies the specific violence of emotional neoliberalism: we turn envy into personal moral failure. ‘If he succeeded, why didn't I?’ Comparison ceases to be a sin and becomes a metric — and failing at the metric is failing as a human being.

Simone de Beauvoir anticipated this dynamic in her analysis of the female condition: women learned to see themselves as ‘Other,’ their existence constantly measured against external standards. Today, this externalisation of value criteria has become universal. We have all become women in the Beauvoirian sense — condemned to judge our worth through lenses we did not polish.

The Attention Economy and Vigilant Capitalism

Here we come to the technical core: the greener grass is the product of a carefully crafted attention economy. Digital platforms operate according to a simple logic: comparison generates engagement, engagement generates data, data generates revenue.

The feed is not a mirror of the world; it is algorithmic curation of contrasts. It systematically shows us achievements that are subtly unattainable — enough to generate aspiration, not enough to generate giving up. It is the hedonistic treadmill converted into a user interface.

Social psychologist Melanie Klein would help us understand the psychic dimension: we grow up internalising the ‘gaze of the other’ as a superegoic instance. Social networks have externalised and multiplied this gaze to infinity. We now have a thousand superegos in the form of followers, each with their own implicit criteria of value.

The Botany of the False: Grass as a Commodity

Green grass has literally become a commodity. We no longer talk about experiences, but about ‘content.’ Not about life, but about ‘narrative.’ The consumer industry — and its ideological arm, marketing — sells solutions to problems that it itself creates by continually showing us greener grass.

As anthropologist Nathalie Heinich has noted, we live in an era of ‘abundance paradox’: the more we have access to the achievements of others, the more we feel our own experience is lacking. The neighbour's perfect grass is often the product of:

->Selective editing: Showing the flowers, hiding the smelly fertiliser

->Invisible financing: Debts, inheritances, undeclared privileges

->Misleading temporality: The peak of a moment presented as a permanent state

->Externalisation of costs: Outsourced emotional labour, invisible maintenance

Pathologies of Comparative Gaze: From Envy to Emptiness

Chronic comparison generates a specific pathology: the inability to inhabit one's own time. We live in constant temporal dissonance — the other already reaps while we still sow, the other already displays while we still build.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt would warn of the ‘banality of evil’ in this dynamic: evil is not in explicit hatred, but in the normalisation of emptiness itself. When we accept that our value must be measured in relation to others, we commit violence against our own uniqueness.

Writer Clarissa Estés, in her analysis of the archetype of the ‘wild woman,’ identifies the antidote: reconnecting with the natural cycles of growth and decay that are unique to us, not comparative. Your grass blooms at the right time for your specific soil — comparing it to that of the desert or the forest is a categorical error.

For a Phenomenology of One's Own Grass

The revolutionary exercise is not to learn not to compare — it is impossible for a social being. The exercise is to compare with historical intelligence.

->Compare horizons, not peaks: The other shows you their moment of harvest; are you seeing their planting process?

->Identify hidden costs: Every green blade of grass has its price — in time, sacrifice, renunciation... Would you pay the specific price your neighbour paid?

->Denaturalise the criterion: Why is “green” the supreme value? Who defined this existential colour palette?

->Recognise seasonality: Grass has cycles. What looks green today may be burnt by the sun tomorrow.

->Map your ecosystem: What soil does your grass grow in? What climate? Under what conditions? Comparing without considering the habitat is an ecological fallacy.

The Self-Care Revolution as a Political Act

When Audre Lorde declared that ‘self-care is a political act,’ she was referring precisely to this: resisting the externalisation of value criteria. Your garden will not be judged by the standards of the Royal Horticultural Society if you decide to grow cacti instead of grass.

Psychologist Viktor Frankl speaks of the most extreme experience of dispossession, from which we draw an existential lesson: even when everything is taken from us, the ‘last of human freedoms’ remains—that of choosing our attitude in the face of circumstances. The grass in the concentration camp was literally grey, but some found meaning where others saw only grey.

From Observation to Cultivation

The neighbour's grass seems greener for three technical reasons:

1. Perspective: We see their garden from a privileged angle, ours from above, seeing every flaw

2. Illumination: The sun of admiration shines obliquely on what belongs to others

3. Depth of field: We focus on their surface, while we know our roots are rotting

The challenge is not to stop looking — it is to learn to see. To see that behind every flawless blade of grass there is:

->Hours of silent watering

->Weeds pulled one by one

->Periods of drought not photographed

->The constant choice between blooming here or there

Your grass, dear reader, is not worse — it is different. And difference, in a world homogenised by comparative algorithms, is in itself an act of botanical resistance.

Cultivate your garden with the seriousness of someone who knows that no other gardener has your hands, your soil, your history. And when the temptation to compare arises — because it will — remember: you are seeing the cover of someone else's book, not its truncated chapters. Your own book, with all its narrative flaws, is the only work that you can truly sign as authentic.

The greenest grass is always where we water it with care, not where we admire it with envy.

 

‘The illusion crumbles when we question reality.’ – UN4RT

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