I once made the terrible mistake of telling a fellow writer, as a joke, that I had recently been paid an insanely large sum for writing a half-hour comedy script.
I actually named the figure (it was about 10 times the going amount at the time) and held my face in a blank and emotionless expression as the fellow writer’s eyes popped nearly out of his skull.
“You. Are. Kidding. Me,” he said, with deadly seriousness.
“No,” I said breezily. “That’s what they paid me. Anyway, what do you think about — ”
“That. Cannot. Be. True,” he said, once again barking out each word in a confused and desperate sputter.
You see, I knew this guy was competitive — precisely how competitive, I was about to find out — and that the several minutes I allowed him to believe I was vastly out-earning him would elevate his blood pressure and probably cause a series of tiny, undetectable strokes.
I fully intended to clap him on the back, sometime just before the combination of jealousy and competitive rage caused him to experience what neurologists refer to as a “cerebral accident,” break into a hearty laugh, and say, “Yes! Of course I’m kidding!” But there was something in his expression, something about the way he said, “Really? You?” that made me hesitate. His inability to believe that anyone would value my talent at that rate was insulting and hurtful even though he was totally correct: No one would.
So I decided not to tell him it was a joke. I decided to let his aneurysms flow.
There was once a study done on people in the military. It measured stress levels and the general unhappiness of certain divisions, and what it uncovered was this: People serving in divisions of the military where there were lots of promotions, where people moved up through the ranks more quickly, were the most stressed out and unhappy divisions in the military.
In other words, if you spend a lot of time watching other people get good stuff, you become stressed out and unhappy. You develop ticks and twitches. Your health deteriorates. You get bitter and curdled. Everything turns sour and angry. People are happier, in general, when the unhappiness is spread around. They get touchy when their friends and colleagues start to succeed.
We know this, of course, from watching our fat friends lose weight. There’s nothing more irritating and depressing than that.
This is a week about winning and losing. All over the country, the kind of stressful anger that researchers studying military personnel discovered in 1947 is erupting in all the usual places: living rooms, Zoom calls with college students and their parents, cable news sets, and Twitter.
It’s not just that, for half the country, the wrong guy won the election. It’s that we all know someone, probably someone close to us, who feels victorious. Who feels happy about the election. Who gets to take the W. And that’s driving half of us crazy with rage.
Which, if you believe the research, is unhealthy. We’re supposed to be above that kind of thing.
On the other hand, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to feel the sting of rejection across your face. It’s not uniformly bad, I think, to watch someone else win the election, get the applause, sit in the big chair.
If you find yourself wallowing in rage at the injustice of it all, that’s not good. But if you find yourself redoubling your efforts, reenergizing your work and your commitment just because you can’t wait to see the look on the faces of those smug you-know-whats when you succeed, then what’s the harm in that?
When I noticed that my friend’s left eye was drooping in an alarming way, I decided to tell him the truth. I patiently explained that I was just playing a little joke on him.
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” he said. “And also, do you smell burning toast?”
“I’m telling you the truth,” I said. “I’m not just trying to make you feel better.”
But I said it without a lot of conviction. I held back on the truly emphatic delivery it would have taken to convince him because then I would have been obligated to tell him the exact figure I was being paid to write the script, which I suspected was a little less than what he usually received, and that would have made him happy.
And it would have made me miserable. Can’t have that.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
