A Finite Life Is Too Precious for Endless Envy

1. Spring arrives at different times

The willows beside the river in our neighborhood wake in the same order every year. In early March, the branches closest to the water are already veiled in pale yellow-green. Across the stone path, the trees in the shade remain bare and dark, as though spring had forgotten their address. People on their morning walks stop to feel sorry for them. By late April, green hangs over the whole path. You can no longer tell which tree came first. The early ones have begun scattering the white fluff that everyone complains about; the late ones have glossy new leaves.

The Tang poet Wang Zhihuan asked why a frontier flute should lament the willows, then wrote that the spring wind never reached the distant Jade Gate Pass. He was writing about the cold beyond China's frontier. In idle moments between teaching and reading, I like to borrow his first line and turn it around. Perhaps the wind isn't playing favorites. Perhaps it reaches us at different times.

Much resentment begins when we mistake the order of things in a brief interval for a verdict on an entire life. There is a surprisingly innocent assumption hidden in it: that the world has finished making its decisions and will never revise the rankings.

We see only the stretch of life in front of us. At a reunion at thirty, one classmate seems to command the room, and we assume he has figured everything out. At fifty, we meet another down on his luck and imagine his fate is settled. Both pictures may be accurate. They were simply taken in different years. Only by putting the frames together do we begin to see the course of a life.

I can hear an objection. The willow analogy is too convenient. The trees by the water have the better position and come into leaf first every year. Those in the shade remain ten days behind. No amount of talk about changing seasons puts them in front. That is precisely what people mean by entrenched class advantage.

I take the objection seriously. Over a short enough period, it is often true: take a ten-year slice and many of those at the top remain there, while many at the bottom are still struggling.

But ten years is still a photograph. We are prone to treating a position in the photograph as the ending of the film. Across thirty years, more of the cards may have changed hands. China's university entrance examination was suspended for more than a decade before resuming in the winter of 1977. Children who had grown up working in the fields entered the examination halls. A change in the rules changed the queue. That was an institutional break, not a declaration of heaven's favorites.

Even the ground beneath an advantage can move. One day a road crew takes out the trees by the river, and those in the second row find themselves in the midday sun. A favorable position is something we occupy. We don't own the conditions that make it favorable.

One of life's easiest mistakes is to read an accumulated stock as a forecast. What we have tells us something about yesterday's victories. What we can still develop matters for tomorrow. To put the poet's question in plainer terms: by late April, how many walkers remember which branch turned green first?

2. Status is rented

Power and status often rest on a scarce position, rules that currently hold, and people willing to recognize the authority those rules confer. Loosen any one of those supports and the value can fall quickly.

Economists use the idea of asset specificity to describe something tailored to a particular use. Outside its original setting, it may be worth much less. The Chinese saying that “the tea cools when the person leaves” captures the experience nicely. A retired official receives far fewer New Year visitors than he did a year earlier. It is tempting to blame everyone's fickleness, but the office, and much of the value attached to it, has been withdrawn.

A title on a business card can be valuable because of the reaction it produces. Baudrillard called this kind of social distinction sign-value. The person's practical ability may be a separate matter. Once fewer people honor the title, the symbol starts to look like a ticket nobody will redeem.

An asset tied to position brings another problem: it is difficult to pass on intact. In his work on parents' and children's heights, Francis Galton observed that children of unusually tall parents were, on average, less extreme in height. Children of unusually short parents also tended to be closer to the population mean. This became known as regression to the mean. When characteristics across generations are imperfectly correlated, an extreme parental value will not, on average, be reproduced to the same extent in the children.

There is an analogy with success. Ability, a historical opening, and a few well-timed strokes of luck may all help one generation reach a high position. The opening and the luck cannot necessarily be passed down. But a statistical relationship in height does not prove that any particular family must decline, or give us a timetable for its wealth to disappear.

There is also a substantial challenge to the easy story of constant reshuffling. Economic historians Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins have used surnames to trace status over centuries. Their findings suggest much stronger persistence than many people expect. This is evidence that any argument about rapid turnover has to confront.

My suspicion is that some persistence occurs between major disruptions, and that the survival of a family name need not mean the survival of an unchanged asset. A family can move from land to office and later to education. Each transition may involve a difficult reconstruction concealed by the same surname on the ancestral tablets. I am not certain of that interpretation. Surname records don't show all the rearrangements within a household.

Today I think a new force is accelerating some of those rearrangements. Schumpeter described capitalism in terms of creative destruction: new activities undermine the advantages of older ones. Many well-paid positions have depended partly on an information gap. I know something you don't, so I can charge for access. AI is reducing the cost of some kinds of knowledge.

Bertrand price competition helps explain the pressure, under particular conditions. When firms sell identical products, face the same costs, and have no capacity constraints, price competition can push prices toward marginal cost. Real services also depend on trust, responsibility, differentiation, and regulation. AI does not abolish those conditions. Still, as more people acquire a capable assistant and some services become easier to reproduce, rents once protected by exclusive knowledge may shrink. My judgment is that certain changes once measured in generations may now unfold in years.

When the barrier to entry moves from “only I know how” to “ask the screen,” what exactly is the incumbent still charging for?

3. The bill for envy

Resentment and envy appear to be free. Nobody sends you an invoice. They take payment in time and attention instead.

Consider how the feeling begins. Prospect theory describes gains and losses relative to a reference point, with losses often carrying greater weight. A class reunion group or a social feed can quietly move that reference point to the most conspicuously successful person you know. Your circumstances haven't changed, but someone else's promotion makes them feel like a loss. Meanwhile, the part of another life you see is selected for display. Few people announce their lonely hours with equal enthusiasm. Comparing that edited selection with your entire unedited life puts you at a disadvantage before you begin.

Why is the expense so easy to overlook? Mental accounting describes how we separate money into categories: groceries here, entertaining there. Envy produces no obvious cash outflow, so it never reaches an account we are accustomed to checking. Veblen understood that conspicuous consumption needs an audience. When someone displays a carefully chosen fragment of their life, the envious viewer pays for admission with attention.

There is a defense of envy worth hearing. Admiration can provoke effort. Confucius urged people to emulate the worthy. Plenty of worthwhile changes have begun with the thought, “Why can't I do that?” If the comparison becomes action, the time may have paid for an education. If all it produces is a sigh after you close the app, it has been consumption.

One way to tell the difference is to ask, before turning out the light, whether the evening has left you with anything specific you can do tomorrow morning.

Try writing out tonight's bill. Two hours of a spring evening spent thinking about someone else's car, house, and new title. What could those hours have bought? Half the book on your desk, perhaps, or a page of writing worth keeping. You may have earned nothing from the comparison. If it leaves you too agitated to sleep, the return is worse than zero. Your time doesn't expand because someone else has more. While you study their accounts, yours go unattended.

Outside, the wind rises. The book is still open at the same page.

4. Stay in the game

If resenting the world is a poor use of time, there is work to get back to. What kind of work? A little arithmetic helps.

Compounding works through multiplication. Whatever has accumulated before, a later multiplier of zero wipes out the product. Discussions of ergodicity in physics and economics address, among other things, whether an average across many people corresponds to an average along one person's path through time. A hundred people each placing one bet is not the same experiment as one person placing a hundred successive bets with the same capital. The group average can look attractive while an individual path carries a risk of irreversible ruin. In a model where ruin is an absorbing state, there is no return once it has been reached.

Imagine a strategy that does well in most years but occasionally loses all the capital. Its average reported performance can look persuasive. If each round carries an independent, fixed positive probability of irreversible ruin, the probability of eventual ruin approaches one as the rounds continue. Whether a real strategy meets those assumptions is a separate question.

Time is the other part of compounding, and you need to remain able to participate to benefit from it. Before asking how much a trade could make, ask whether a bad outcome could take you out altogether.

I use four rough tests for worthwhile work. Does it accumulate, so that today's effort is still there tomorrow? Can I begin without depending entirely on someone else's permission? Can it create value over time without requiring the other person to be ruined? And, when this attempt is finished, will I still be able to try again? The last question is the hardest limit. You can negotiate the other three. Once you are out, there is little left to negotiate.

Look again at permission. Income dependent on an approval, a license, or a personal connection can appear secure until that permission is withdrawn. It belongs to the same family as positional power: a benefit borrowed from a particular arrangement, carrying the risk that the arrangement ends.

Of course people do sensible things and still lose everything. There are many of them. Survivorship bias stays with us. Those left standing can describe their methods, but their accounts contain some share of luck. I am not offering a guarantee for “doing the right thing.” I want to point out how much hard work can be directed at a losing course. The problem is not always laziness. It may be the refusal to stop because so much has already been spent.

At the edge of a cliff, having struggled for miles is a poor reason to keep walking. Stopping a mistake can be worth more than doubling the effort invested in it.

If you've held a failing asset for a long time, are you keeping it because of its future, or because you cannot bear to surrender the years already given to it?

5. You can transfer a title, not judgment

Anything conveyed by a document is comparatively easy to pass on. Property changes hands by deed. A bank account gets a new owner. In some periods, even office and rank have been extended to descendants. No clever lawyer can transfer the contents of a mind.

Economics calls acquired abilities human capital. Pierre Bourdieu made a related distinction within cultural capital: its embodied form consists of habits, taste, and judgment that have become part of a person. They take time to acquire. Wealthy parents cannot hire somebody to acquire them on a child's behalf. The patience to stay with a difficult book, or the curiosity to work through unfamiliar rules, won't fit into a will.

The decline of the Jia family in the Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber makes a useful case. In chapter 13, Qin Keqing appears in a dream to the capable Wang Xifeng and warns that every feast must end. While the family is prosperous, she urges it to buy land near its ancestral graves and establish its school there, giving descendants some protection if fortunes change. The land would support them; the school would educate them. Together they would help later generations make a life of their own.

The precautions don't become the family's governing priorities. The households spend ever more lavishly while their ability to manage their affairs weakens. During the search of the Grand View Garden in chapter 74, Tanchun warns that a family of that size is difficult to destroy from outside; internal disorder is what brings it down.

There is a pointed echo outside the novel. Cao Xueqin's own family suffered confiscation under the Yongzheng emperor. He later lived in poverty near Beijing and wrote the work. Officials could seize houses, land, and account books. They could not confiscate what he understood.

But can't money buy the best education? It can buy entry to excellent schools, better conditions for learning, and prestigious credentials. In Michael Spence's signaling model, part of a credential's value is the information it conveys to an employer about the holder's ability. If an identical credential became easy for everyone to obtain, its power to distinguish candidates would weaken. Where employers cannot observe ability and lack other credible signals, capable applicants who struggle to demonstrate their skills may lose out. That resembles Akerlof's information problem, although it is not an inevitable outcome in every education market.

Money can pay for instruction and for the outward signal. Understanding and judgment still have to be learned by the person who will use them.

Inheritance becomes difficult partly because of the form an asset takes. Land may be acquired for a road. An office must be relinquished. Inflation and changed rules can diminish what a bank balance will buy. What I most want to leave the next generation is an ability that can take root again when conditions change: to understand new rules, acquire new skills, and make an independent choice at a turning point.

Learning and judgment can travel with a person more readily than a title. They are not exempt from depreciation. Skills become obsolete; health deteriorates. Human capital also needs care.

The Wang and Xie clans were among the great aristocratic families of the Eastern Jin dynasty. Centuries later, in his poem about Black Robe Lane, Liu Yuxi pictured swallows from the halls of those grand houses flying into the homes of ordinary people. The birds remained. The social order beneath their nests had changed.

6. What we leave works together

Wisdom, wealth, and choice are three things an older generation can try to leave. As a teacher, I find it more useful to think of how they work together than to rank them. Judgment helps someone recognize an opportunity. Wealth gives them room to bear a setback, and sometimes the confidence to refuse a bad arrangement. Choice is the point of the exercise: some ability to live a life of one's own.

The value of the buffer becomes clearest in turbulent years. Some investors forced to sell during a crash had a defensible view of value but lacked the cash to wait for it to be recognized. Being right and being able to wait are different resources.

An option offers a useful, limited analogy for choice. In a standard financial model, holding other inputs constant, a purchased call option generally becomes more valuable as volatility rises; at expiry, its loss is limited to the premium paid. Life offers no such automatic floor. Opportunities expire, changing careers costs money, and real losses can exceed the reserve. The useful part of the comparison is the value of preserving room to act.

When conditions change quickly, being able to change course matters. Money left by parents can help pay for that flexibility. It may let a young person turn down a job they dislike or a deal that violates their principles.

Without judgment, inherited money can be lost through poor decisions. Without resources, someone may see an opportunity clearly and still have no way to pursue it. And if the parents never let go, the child may have both resources and ability without ever getting to use them on their own terms. A powerful engine has been fitted to somebody else's car.

Judgment also affects where a family's buffer goes. One person uses it to buy time and wait for an attractive price. Another takes the same amount into the loudest room and joins the excitement.

Changes in position can run in either direction. Those below needn't assume their present place is permanent. Those above have reason to worry if they begin to regard it as a natural possession. Neither group can afford to stop learning. My judgment is that AI may bring some of these changes sooner than many expect, compressing certain transitions once measured in generations into a few years. That is a view of what may happen, not a timetable I can prove.

For a family, preparation resembles a long-term commitment made across cycles. Invest in the development of your own people before the pressure arrives. Waiting passively for a favorable hand leaves you dependent on the cards others choose to play.

“Before” means something quite ordinary. Teach what you know while you still have the energy. Set aside the buffer while there is something to spare. And begin the difficult business of letting go early enough that the child still wants to sit and talk with you. Let them take the wheel while mistakes are affordable. Done in time, much of this costs daily patience. Delayed until the roof is shaking, it can cost generations.

This April, the willows by the river turned green again. The early trees at the water's edge had begun to release their white fluff. The wind carried it over the path, where it settled on the new leaves of the trees that had spent March in shade.