The Art of Living

Reality Minus Envy

by Dana Raye Barnaby

Think about it, only one hundred years ago, a hot shower was a luxury.  My grandparents, who worked the fields all day on their little plot of land in wind-swept, dusty Alberta - didn’t have the simple pleasure of life to turn on the tap and relax under the flow of hot water. A dishwasher was a futuristic marvel and yes, even the idea of a washing machine in your own home? Only fashioned for the upper class. My ancestors, like most of the middle class didn’t expect these things as baseline necessities; they were earned, upgraded into, and deeply appreciated.

Imagine this: my sister reminded me that when our mother was a teenager, the highlight of Christmas wasn’t the gifts - which there were very few - but the arrival of mandarin oranges, as they came wrapped in soft green tissue paper, which she much preferred to the rough newspaper she used as toilet paper the rest of the year.

Today, we live in an age where these comforts are not only expected but seen as non-negotiable - simply because we get used to how great our life is…

Sadly, I found myself to be one of those people - mindlessly scrolling through instagram, with the promise that if I took these simple steps, I too could have a 5K/month lucrative side hustle and become stress free - when an interview with comedian Jimmy Carr stopped me in my tracks. He wasn’t being funny - he was being brutally honest. He was, in essence, laying out the mimetic theory of privilege, pleasure, advancement, mindfulness, desire, and gratefulness.

It hit me hard: How can we, as members of the most privileged one percent of humans to have ever lived, often feel so negative about our lives? We have more luxury and comfort at our fingertips now, than anyone did even fifty years ago.

“We’re living like kings, and yet life has never been objectively better - and subjectively worse. Because the nature of humanity is our desires are mimetic - it’s your quality of life, minus envy - and that’s how happy you are.” Jimmy Carr.

Our quality of life, it seems, has not risen with our perceived standard of living. And why is that? Perhaps one reason lies in something French philosopher René Girard called mimetic desire: the idea that we don’t desire things independently, but rather because others seem to desire them.

In a digital age where we’re constantly bombarded with curated lifestyles, mimetic desire becomes a trap. We don’t just want comfort - we want what they have. And if we can’t have it, we feel like we’re losing.

But here's the paradox: most of what "they" have, is an illusion.

As my own world continues to shift - first with the film union strikes of 2023, then the studio shutdowns of 2024, and now the looming threat of debilitating tariffs in 2025 - I found myself scrolling through feeds thinking that the life I was watching was now the life I had somehow failed to achieve.

Influencers don’t just flaunt their lifestyles - they monetize them. In the AI-powered hustle economy, everyone is selling something: an ebook, a course, a lifestyle funnel. The dream they pitch is polished, filtered, and completely disconnected from most people’s real lives. It’s a system built to make envy feel like motivation, while quietly draining our peace of mind.

Social media has turned life into a marketplace. Everything - our bodies, relationships, vacations, productivity - is on sale. And in this endless scroll of comparative perfection, the old joys of gradual growth, discovery, and earned success feel obsolete.

When Gen Z graduates into the world expecting marble countertops and in-unit laundry, it’s not entitlement; it’s conditioning. The baseline has shifted, not because of what they need, but because of what they see.

Dating has suffered, too. What once required time, effort, and intentional presence - walks, talks, shared meals, awkward silences - has been replaced with swipes, texts, and hasty judgments. People are making permanent decisions based on temporary bios.

Love used to unfold slowly. Now we discard potential partners like expired groceries because they don’t match an image we were never supposed to pursue in the first place.

The constant chase for instant gratification - be it through Google, Amazon, or Tinder - has severed something ancient in us: our ability to wait. To long for. To grow toward. And in its place, we’ve been handed a counterfeit: immediate access with no emotional investment.

It’s no wonder we feel fractured in our sense of being, in our pursuit of happiness, in the way we measure our own worth.

So what do we do?

We slow down.

We look inward.

We stop chasing what everyone else seems to want, and start listening to our hearts.

Because true peace, as Naval Ravikant put it, might simply be:

Your reality, minus your envy.

And that subtraction, quiet, deliberate, defiant - is a practice. An art, really.

The Art of Living not for illusion, but for the quiet truth of your own becoming.

Thank you for taking the time to join me on this journey of reflection and storytelling. If these words have resonated, you might enjoy my second series of essays called, The Vanishing Gentleman.

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