On one of my social media timelines, someone shared an interview fragment. In it, a guest makes the case that happiness is essentially your quality of life minus envy. A simple, almost brutal statement. And while I followed everything that was said, I also thought: “yes, but it’s more complicated than that”. Because the problem isn’t only that we envy what others have as if it’s a competition. The problem is that we’ve been handed the wrong leaderboard, and most of us don’t even notice we’re playing by it.
A few years back, I swapped my station wagon for a smaller car. The logic was straightforward and made total sense to me: it was too big a car for me and my family, and a newer, more compact model fit our lives better. Better mileage, more comfort, less cost, and still more than enough space to move things around and go on holidays. By any rational measure, an upgrade.
I was in a meeting not long after. Someone asked how things were going, and I answered honestly: less flying around the world, more time at home, fulfilling projects underway, and a brand-new car that actually suited me. The response was a “hmmm“, followed by a slow look out the window toward the parking lot.
That “hmmm” is what this article is about.
Measurement of Satisfaction
There’s a concept in philosophy, developed by René Girard, called mimetic desire. The idea is that we don’t know what we want on our own. We learn to want things by watching others want them. We don’t desire objects; we desire what other people’s desire tells us is worth having. It’s not greed, exactly; it’s more like a perpetual calibration, an invisible social algorithm that tells us whether we’re up or down, ahead or behind.
The “hmmm” wasn’t about my car really. It was the sound of mimetic desire in action; a reflexive judgment based on a leaderboard I’d never agreed to play on. And it’s the wrong scoreboard entirely. It is, however, running constantly, often without our consent. If you start looking, you can see it almost anywhere.
The interview fragment gets close to this when it says we “get used to how great our life is“. The point being: abundance becomes baseline. The hot shower nobody had a hundred years ago is invisible to us now. What becomes visible instead is whoever appears to have more than we do. And the gap between what we have and what that person appears to have becomes the unit of measurement for satisfaction, or the lack of it. Happiness, as the interview fragment says, doesn’t seem to come from how great your life actually already is.
“We’re living like kings, and yet, life has never been objectively better and subjectively worse. Because the nature of humanity is that our desires are mimetic”.
The manosphere ranks men against each other, on the basis of cars owned, money accumulated, and women acquired, as though life were a leaderboard with a single axis. Those with the luxurious yachts, the latest fashion, the expensive watches; they’re the ones who get the spotlight, even if the bling and the swag are made up entirely.
The beauty industry has built a multi-billion Euro architecture around the premise that your current self is the problem, and the product is the solution. The surgical tourism that follows isn’t vanity in the traditional sense. Young women flying to Istanbul for procedures that carry genuine risk is the logical endpoint of a system that has been telling them, every day and from every direction, that how they look is not good enough.
“Ik snap het wel, maar ik wil het niet begrijpen”.
In professional life, the same mechanism operates with slightly more polish. Air miles as status, premium club memberships as ambition, and the label on the car as a shorthand for whether you’re moving up or sliding down.
I once told someone I preferred flying Easyjet from Amsterdam to Milano and vice versa because it got me home faster: Malpensa rather than Linate, which meant less commute and more time with my family. The response was somewhere between puzzled and pitying. Why would I not fly KLM instead, and collect the air miles? The logic was impeccable. But it scored zero… on the wrong scoreboard.
A Different Leaderboard
So, what’s the alternative?
If the wrong leaderboard is everywhere, what does the right one look like?
The evidence for a different leaderboard isn’t just anecdotal. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies of its kind, found that the quality of our relationships, not our achievements, predicts a life well-lived. Not the number, the quality. The people you can call at two o’clock in the morning. The ones who knew you before you had anything to prove.
At a societal scale, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics argues for a floor of sufficiency and a ceiling of sustainability, rejecting the notion that growth alone equals progress. The model is not anti-ambition; it is anti-waste. The distinction matters.
Blue zones, those clusters of communities where people routinely live past ninety in good health, share almost none of the markers we typically associate with success. They are not wealthy. They are not optimised. What they have is purpose, movement built into daily life, and dense social fabric. They eat together. They know their neighbours. They do not, apparently, spend much time checking what cars other people are driving.
And Bronnie Ware, the palliative care nurse who spent years with people in the last weeks of their lives and recorded what they regretted, found a consistent pattern; almost no one wished they had worked more, earned more, or accumulated more. They wished they had let themselves be happier. They wished they had stayed in touch with people who mattered. They wished, in other words, that they had been playing a different game.
None of this is an argument for passivity or for abandoning drive or ambition. Progress is real: medicine, technology, the fact that children don’t routinely die in infancy anymore. These are the products of ambition applied to the right problems.
The drive to improve isn’t the enemy. What is worth questioning is what the drive is pointed at, and who decided to go for it.
Consuminderen
There is a Dutch word that does not translate cleanly: consuminderen, a contraction of consumeren and verminderen, meaning consuming less. But not as deprivation, rather, as a deliberate choice. As a recognition that more is not always more, and that the cost of optimising for the wrong variable is a life that scores well on a scoreboard nobody actually cares about.
The bluefin tuna, fattened on sardines, herring, and mackerel, to serve a luxury market, is a decent metaphor for the whole system. Other fish exist, at a fraction of the cost, and feed far more people. But the logic of the wrong scoreboard requires the expensive version, because the expensive version is the point. Not the fish.
I am not making the case that I have this figured out. The scoreboard is pervasive, and none of us is entirely free of it. But I’ve noticed that the moments in my own life that register as genuinely good are almost never the ones that would impress anyone. They tend to be quieter, more specific, and mostly unremarkable from the outside.
The people I respect most share something similar: they’re not performing for an audience that isn’t even watching. They have, somewhere along the way, decided to want what they have. Not as resignation, but rather as a considered position.
The “hmmm” at the car in the parking lot was not malicious. The person probably forgot it the moment I left the room. But it is the sound the wrong scoreboard makes when it recalibrates. Constant, quiet, and almost entirely invisible.
Until you start noticing it and choose to play by a different set of rules.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hmmm-factor-keeping-wrong-scores-roland-biemans-ejwoe
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