It’s a strange sentence when you sit with it. Montesquieu was writing in the early eighteenth century, before mass media, before advertising, before the specific technology that now lets a person scroll through curated evidence of everyone else’s better life for hours at a time before breakfast. And yet he’d already put his finger on the mechanism. Not the technology. The mechanism the technology would eventually amplify.
The line has three moving parts, and each one is doing real work.
The first part is that being happy, on its own terms, isn’t actually all that complicated. Most of the things that reliably produce a good week are unglamorous and available. Sleep. Some movement. A few people you love. Work that engages you. Enough to eat. A walk. A book. A conversation. If someone genuinely wanted to be happy, Montesquieu is suggesting, they could put those ingredients together without much fuss and get most of the way there most of the time.
The second part is that this isn’t what most of us actually want. What we want, if we’re honest about it, is to be doing better than the people around us. Not just fine. Not just okay. Ahead. The comparison isn’t incidental to the wanting. It’s the whole shape of it. Being at the sixtieth percentile of well-being isn’t experienced as being sixtieth-percentile-happy. It’s experienced as being fortieth-percentile-behind.
Which is, on any honest reckoning of ordinary human psychology, a game that can’t really be won. Someone is always going to be doing better on some visible axis. Their kitchen is more finished. Their job is more impressive. Their kids sleep through the night. Their marriage looks warmer from the outside. Their holiday photos are better. There’s no configuration of your life in which every visible comparison lands in your favour, because there are too many axes and too many other people, and the comparisons never stop coming.
The third part of Montesquieu’s sentence is the one that makes the whole picture click. We believe others to be happier than they are. Not slightly. Systematically. What we’re actually comparing ourselves to, when we compare, is a version of everyone else’s life that has been edited, presented, and quietly polished before it reached us. The dinner they posted a photo of. The trip they told a story about. The promotion they mentioned in passing. All of it real, all of it a fraction of what’s actually going on in their week, and none of it including the argument they had the night before or the anxiety they haven’t told anyone about or the tax bill sitting on the kitchen table.
Which means the losing side of the comparison isn’t even a real thing. It’s a composite. You’re comparing your interior experience, which contains all your worries and boredom and small failures, against a curated exterior of someone else’s life, which contains none of theirs. The comparison was rigged before it started. And you’re going to lose it every time, because that’s how the arithmetic works.
Then there’s another thought entirely – what if you can be happy by giving up on the pursuit of happiness altogether? This video dives into it and will leave you with some food for thought…
Montesquieu wasn’t naïve about any of this. He wasn’t suggesting the fix is to want less. He was pointing at something more specific. The thing that makes happiness hard to reach isn’t the ordinary difficulty of arranging a life. It’s the specific extra step of measuring the life you’ve arranged against a distorted image of everyone else’s. Remove the distortion, and the arithmetic changes. Not because your life gets any better, but because the yardstick you were using stops producing a systematically negative reading.
The uncomfortable practical implication is that most of the effort we put into becoming happier gets spent on the wrong problem. We try to add more to the life. Another achievement. Another purchase. Another visible marker that would, we hope, close the gap we feel between where we are and where everyone else seems to be. Which doesn’t work, because the gap isn’t produced by anything on our side of the comparison. It’s produced by the distortion on the other side. And no amount of adding to your own life will fix a comparison that’s been rigged by the incomplete information you have about somebody else’s.
What would actually help, on Montesquieu’s reading, is smaller and quieter. Notice when the comparison is running. Notice that the version of the other person’s life you’re comparing yourself to isn’t the real one. Notice that they’re doing the same thing about you, probably, from their side of it. And notice that if you just wanted to be happy, without needing to be happier than anyone else, most of the ingredients are already sitting in your Tuesday afternoon.
Maybe the invitation is to notice, this week, how often you’re doing the second thing when you thought you were doing the first. And to see what happens if, for one evening, you let yourself just have the life you’ve got, without the tax of measuring it against a version of everyone else’s that was never really there.
Kiran Athar writes about the ordinary corners of a life examined slowly.
