From then on, every expenditure we noticed — packages arriving seemingly daily from Bloomingdale’s and Restoration Hardware, hiring someone to repaint their apartment, the installation of the antiques! — it was all dismissed as “mortgage money.”

They are the Joneses, and we are not keeping up. However much we understand that we are not — not, under any circumstance — to covet our neighbor’s anything or to attempt to keep up with the Joneses, we can’t seem to help it. We are gripped by this involuntary urge, a drive to compare and compete that is ingrained, at least in Americans, if not all people.

We have been challenging ourselves to keep up with the Joneses for time eternal, even though it frays our nerves and is a quest without any destination. We know we shouldn’t do it, we try not to, yet we find it irresistible.

It’s not just that we want more for ourselves but that we specifically want more than, or at least as much as, what others have. That’s how we know how much we deserve: It depends on what the other guy has. Since the days of Cain and Abel we have been bickering and jostling over who has the better lot. Wealth and well-being are largely a mindset, and how we’re doing in relation to the company we keep is key to our contentment.

It would seem logical that the people we envy the most would be those at the top of the ladder, the rich and famous. It’s true that we are fascinated by the wealthy and celebrities, and might fantasize about living their lives, but we are driven by just that, curiosity and fantasizing. We don’t really expect that with enough hard work and some good luck we will end up with millions in the bank and our whereabouts splashed across the cover of People magazine. It might happen to some, but we don’t count on it.

Who we truly envy are our closest peers. Psychologist Herbert Hyman defined this phenomenon in 1942 in an article titled “The Psychology of Status.” He said we compare ourselves within “reference groups” of those around us and who are similar to us. We look to our classmates, our co-workers, our siblings and our neighbors to see how we measure up and, secretly, who we must catch up with. The super rich and famous have too many variables for us to match, but those with similar backgrounds to ours, with similar advantages and opportunities, those are the people we believe we should be able to match. When one among us breaks away and does much better financially, we feel put down. We want some kind of explanation. Are they just smarter? Did they make better decisions? Why them and not us? Is this fair, after all?

Our visions of success are built on a scaffolding of comparison, and planked with envy. Envy is the only vice warned against in both the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins. In Dante’s purgatory, the closest rung to hell is pride, the second closest is envy. Manhattan therapist Anita Weinreb Katz describes envy like this: “You want what that person has, and you want to destroy the person who has it. It’s a very primitive feeling.”

It’s not pretty. We’re certainly not proud of it, and usually don’t want to admit that we are in its jaws. That leads us straight into troublesome secrecy. The don’t ask, don’t tell policy of life that lets us live around other people. On the rare occasion that someone admits bald-faced envy, we nearly crumble with commiseration and relief. A treasured quote from writer Gore Vidal: “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” We can laugh that off as an artistic temperament, but when we’re honest with ourselves we know that there is more there, that we suffer similarly, by letting our relative positions in our various groups affect our well-being, whether we mean to or not. So we can’t help ourselves from quietly scoping others’ situations, from private investigating to figure out what others have and, consequently, what we should have too.

Tina invited me over for a late-afternoon glass of wine, to get further acquainted. My Honeymooners plan was progressing. As we walked up the stairs to her living room, she asked me what I do and I told her I’m a journalist.

Really? she asked. She seemed excited by it, and I felt proud that my job impressed her. Then she announced, I work for the New York Times!

No way! I said, while I really did think to myself, NO WAY! A competitive mushroom popped out at me like an airbag. I might not care about her wearing better clothes, but when it comes to career I didn’t need competition living next door, on staff at the Times. Forget the Honeymooners, that was two generations ago. Times were gentler. I wanted to go back down the stairs and ignore our new neighbors and their wealthy parents and paid-for apartment forevermore.

Instead, I kept up the conversation with a dry throat: You’re a reporter too? What do you cover?

No, I work in Web development.

Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. She is not a journalist! I do not have to read her articles in the paper, talk shop, or keep up in any way! What a relief. We can be friends again. Maybe I’ll knock on the door to borrow half a cup of sugar one day. I even scoffed a little at Web development. Boring, I thought.

My relief was short-lived. By the time we reached the top of the stairs it came to me: Web development . . . the Internet . . . dot-com millionaire.

Everyone heard stories of twentysomething millionaires minted in the late 1990s. They couldn’t be avoided. They were on television, they were on the covers of magazines, and there weren’t just a few junior moguls, they seemed to be everywhere. The economy was shaken up like a snow globe, and money really did seem to grow on trees, there for the plucking. The idea of building up a career or business through years of hard work was actually mocked. People used to ask me what I was doing still writing for newspapers and magazines, those relics: Why didn’t I get an Internet job?

Seeing our peers get enormously wealthy on stock options was, to say the least, irksome. We were just as smart and educated and ambitious — how was it fair that they were so much more successful financially? It shouldn’t be any of our business how much money our cohorts make, or how they do it. Why do we chip away at clues, then, building a financial profile of our friends and figuring out where we fit on the scale?

In the United States, at least, where productivity is valued more highly than anything and is generally measured in dollars, this comparison and competition is inbred. It feeds the system. The drive to consume more, to have more and better things, and continually to raise our level of comfort, is stronger here than any other place on earth.

The American Dream itself — the novel system in which every one of us, regardless of background, is not only able but expected to move up, to do better and have more—is at its heart about competition. We’re trained to gaze up one level from where we are and to aspire to get what those people have. Once we accomplish that much, we’re looking up again. By cultural design, there is no end to it.

Setting our goals based on what others are doing goes even deeper than human nature. Fleas, for instance, do some keeping up with the Joneses of their own. They are the world’s highest jumpers. When you put a population of fleas into a box and put the lid on, a few times they’ll jump up and donk their heads on the ceiling. Pretty quickly, though, they learn to jump just as high as the ceiling without hitting it. Take the lid off and they still won’t jump any higher — until a new flea moves into the box who doesn’t know anything about the old lid. The new flea jumps to great heights. The others see it. Then they all start jumping higher again.

Climbing over the Joneses isn’t only a social and financial phenomenon but an economic one. Moving up is our reward for hard work. Desire and envy are the engines that keep us going. Trade up. Earn more. Improve. This is what keeps our capitalist economy throbbing. So while we’re told not to attempt to keep up with the Joneses, tsk-tsk, we’re also shown that that is exactly what we should do. If we all minded our own business, if we were all content with our lot as it is, the economy would slow and our standard of living — which we measure, for the most part, in things — would tumble. “An economy primarily driven by growth must generate discontent,” writes psychologist Paul Wachtel in The Poverty of Affluence. “We cannot be content or the entire economic machine would grind to a halt.”

The trouble is that what’s good for the whole is not necessarily healthy for us as individuals. As Wachtel describes it, “Our personal lives run aground on the perpetual generation of desire and discontent.” Americans are working longer hours and earning more money than ever before, but the reward in terms of greater satisfaction with our lives has failed to materialize. A survey asked who in America feels they have achieved the American Dream. Among those earning less than $15,000 per year, only 5 percent agreed. What about among those earning more than $50,000, which is the top half of the American public? A near tie, at 6 percent. In the Bible a teacher says, “And I saw that all labor and all achievement spring from man’s envy of his neighbor. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind” (Ecclesiastes 4:4). Keeping up with the Joneses puts us on a never-ending, stomach-yanking roller coaster. And we bring it on ourselves.

As soon as John and Tina got back from their tropical honeymoon, she quit her job at the Times. The economy was in the midst of a major slump. Nobody who had a job was complaining, or at least nobody was quitting. But that’s what dot-com millionairehood was all about: You did what you enjoyed, you worked while it was exciting, and then whenever you felt like it, you walked away. And so she did.

She was in the right industry at the right time, that’s for sure, my husband said with a sigh.

Contrasting our situation with theirs was painful. Tina talked about how they would soon start “popping out the kids.” The idea of us having children ourselves, while attractive in theory, seemed practically impossible. We figured John and Tina probably did argue, like everyone, but they probably didn’t argue about money stress, like we did. It wasn’t the material goodies we grew envious of, it was the ease with which they seemed to be able to live. From the clues we collected, John and Tina seemed able to afford a psychological lifestyle that, to our disappointment, far surpassed ours. While our lives felt suffocatingly on hold while we straightened out our financial issues, our next-door neighbors, at our age, were living carefree, apparently enjoying life and each other to the fullest.

Copyright © 2006 by Shira J. Boss

MORE FROM TODAY BOOKS: MONEY

Frustrated with gas prices? Ditch the ride!

Frustrated with gas prices? Ditch the ride! Excerpt: ‘You’re So Money’ No more excuses! Get financially savvy Excerpt: ‘The True Cost of Happiness’ Money tips from the ‘Ultimate Cheapskate’ Excerpt: ‘Stay Mad for Life!’ 4-Hour workweek: How to escape your 9-5 job Trump on how to succeed in business Women & money: Control your finances, life Are you driving your boss crazy?   Add Today Books: Money headlines to your news reader: