[soheyl]

But is it really "human nature"? Go back a few centuries, and everything belonged to a monarchy, and by everything, I mean even your life and your family. Were people unhappy "because of it"? For the vast majority of humans, I doubt it. They had just learned not to compare themselves with the king.

For something to be human nature, I think it needs more time. And if peasants knew that comparing themselves to the king just does not make sense, maybe we can learn to have the same attitude towards Jeff Bezos.

[astan]

Nice response. Part of the problem is "pull yourself up by bootstraps" PG-tier p0rn. With a king, an average person isn't being told everyday that they too can become a king, if only they worked harder. With people like startup founders, VCs, Musk, Bezos and the like, constantly writing articles on how you too can become rich like them: http://paulgraham.com/richnow.html, average people view this life as achievable and it harbors disappointment and insecurity to not achieve those levels.

[soheyl]

Absolutely. I think (hope) that what PG meant in that essay is that the rich people today get there by displaying more "sportsmanship" than 200 years ago. And I generally agree with that. And I think if you compare Bezos and Musk with whoever would rank similarly to them on Forbes list in 1821, you would agree too. But it absolutely does not mean that anyone can get there.

The fact that Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt have won so many medals without (hopefully) juicing or bribing officials is great, and maybe even a cause for celebration for the human race, but it absolutely does not mean that anyone can do those things.

[robocat]

I think using sporting analogies often fail because sports are zero-sum games (only one winner), whereas more than one person can win playing business, and transactions where both sides win are common in non-sporting contexts.

[amelius]

> The fact that Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt have won so many medals without (hopefully) juicing or bribing officials is great, and maybe even a cause for celebration for the human race, but it absolutely does not mean that anyone can do those things.

But if significantly more people tried to do those things, I'm sure some of them would beat those champions.

[futureshock]

I would guide the comparison to the people closest to you, peers, bosses, schoolmates, people whose pet pictures you look at on Facebook. If those people are doing a lot better than you then it can cause some seriously negative emotions. I think the negative impact of social media is that we would have been previously unaware of the lives of more distantly related social connections such as old school friends or coworkers we'd fallen out of touch with and would only have people from our own family and town to compare with. Now you can see that Jimmy just got promoted at Google and took his last vacation to Nepal and you know for sure you've fallen behind on the hedonic treadmill.

[soheyl]

Agreed. The focus of the original article was the widening gap between the top 1% (or 5, or 10) and the rest of the population. I doubt that it will cause "unhappiness". Unhappiness exists when you compare yourself with people within your percentiles (+- 5%).

A plumber in West Virginia is not unhappy because Bezos is so rich. He is unhappy because his welder brother-in-law just got paid after a better paying contract job (or is heavily in debt) and bought a used Audi.

[anthony_barker]

And go back to most of human existence as hunter gatherers humans were very equal. 10,000 years ago the new technology called Agriculture changed this.

Technology has generally always created inequality.