The better question behind comparison is often what part of the other life you actually want.

Envy tends to arrive as a whole package: their job, their house, their apparent ease. Broken apart, it is nearly always one component you are after, and often something modest, like a quieter morning or work that ends at a fixed hour. The undifferentiated version is painful and useless; the specific version is a plan.

When you catch yourself measuring your life against someone else’s, name the single element you would take if you could take only one. Then ask what a smaller version of that would cost, because it is frequently available without the rest of their life attached.