Why Does Someone Else’s Success Make Us So Uncomfortable
Bronwen Sciortino is an International Author and Simplicity Expert who spent almost two decades as an award-winning executive before experiencing a life-changing event that forced her to stop and ask the question, ‘What if there’s a better way to live?
Something fascinating happens online when somebody shares that something has gone really well for them. They might have won an award, landed an opportunity they have been working towards, reached a milestone in their business, published a book or finally achieved something that has mattered to them for a very long time.
The congratulations start to show up in the comments, but then somebody feels the need to add a little perspective. You might see a comment suggesting they were lucky or had opportunities other people didn’t have, while someone else might point out that plenty of people have achieved much more. Before long, a moment that started with somebody simply sharing something they’re proud of becomes a conversation about whether they really deserve to be quite so pleased with themselves.
It’s as if seeing another person say, “Something wonderful happened to me and I’m proud of it,” can make us remarkably uncomfortable. I think there’s something in that worth talking about, because our reaction to another person’s success can sometimes tell us far more about what is happening in our own life than it tells us about theirs.
What exactly are we trying to correct?
When somebody shares good news, there can be this strange urge to correct the size of their celebration. It’s almost as though we have collectively decided there is an acceptable amount of pride a person is allowed to show, and if they cross that invisible line, somebody takes it upon themselves to make sure they remember their place.
What interests me isn’t really the comment itself. I’m much more curious about what happens in the few seconds before somebody types it and why another person’s happiness can suddenly feel like something we need to temper.
After all, their award hasn’t taken our successful moments away, and their promotion hasn’t changed our job. Someone else publishing a book doesn’t stop us writing one, just as another person’s business doing well doesn’t alter what might be possible for ours. None of these things has actually changed our life, yet sometimes another person’s success lands as though it has something to do with us.
When someone else’s success becomes a mirror
This is where things get uncomfortable, because another person’s success can show us things about our own lives that we weren’t expecting to look at.
There you are, perfectly happy scrolling through your feed when you see someone announce the opportunity you secretly wanted, or you watch someone take a leap you have been talking yourself out of taking for years. Perhaps they are being recognised for their work at exactly the moment you have started wondering whether anybody notices yours, and suddenly a post that had absolutely nothing to do with you has touched something tender.
Their post hasn’t created those feelings. It has simply bumped into something that was already there.
I’ve experienced this myself. I’ve watched someone receive something I would have loved to receive and felt that uncomfortable little reaction somewhere inside me. There have also been moments when somebody else’s progress has made me question my own, even though the two had absolutely nothing to do with each other.
I don’t think having that reaction makes us terrible people because uncomfortable feelings are part of being human. What matters is what happens next.
We can use that discomfort as a reason to make someone else’s achievement smaller, or we can become curious about what it might be showing us. Their success might remind us that we are unhappy with something in our own life or bring us face-to-face with something we keep saying we want but haven’t done anything about.
It is much easier to examine their success than become curious about our reaction to it, but perhaps the latter has much more to offer us.
We have a complicated relationship with people being proud
I wonder whether part of the problem is that many of us have grown up with some fairly complicated messages about pride.
We are encouraged to believe in ourselves and acknowledge our achievements, but there can be a surprisingly narrow window between being seen as confident and being accused of thinking too highly of yourself. We want people to succeed, provided they remain suitably humble about it, which means openly saying, “I worked incredibly hard for this and I’m proud of myself,” can make people surprisingly uncomfortable.
So, we learn to soften our good news by making sure everybody knows how lucky we were or finding some way to make the achievement sound a little smaller. There is nothing wrong with gratitude, and very few of us achieve anything entirely on our own, but gratitude and pride are allowed to exist together.
Perhaps seeing someone being openly proud of themselves feels confronting because so many of us have learned not to be.
Apparently, you can be successful too often
There seems to be another invisible rule around success that I find particularly interesting. We might be genuinely happy to celebrate someone the first time they share good news, but when that same person starts sharing success after success, the tone can change surprisingly quickly.
An award might attract warm congratulations, and another achievement a few weeks later may do the same. But when someone seems to keep doing well, you can almost feel patience starting to wear thin. Instead of simply celebrating with them, people start questioning whether they are showing off or trying to make their life look perfect.
This is often where the meanness starts to creep in. It might appear in an openly nasty comment, but it can just as easily arrive disguised as sarcasm, a backhanded compliment or a joke that conveniently takes some of the shine off the moment.
I find this fascinating because their fifth success hasn’t actually taken anything more away from us than their first one did. What has usually changed is the story their success has started telling us about our own life.
One achievement can feel like a moment in time, whereas repeated success can begin to feel like evidence that someone else is moving forward while we feel stuck. If they keep being recognised while we feel unseen, each new announcement can press a little harder against whatever we are already feeling about where we are and where we thought we would be by now.
Yet seeing someone share several successes doesn’t mean we are seeing everything happening in their life. We are looking at individual moments they have chosen to share without knowing what happened between them or what it took to get there.
Perhaps they aren’t showing off at all. They might simply have decided that when something good happens after all the work it took to get there, they are going to let themselves enjoy it.
If we were comfortable applauding their first success but find ourselves irritated by their fifth, that change in our reaction might be worth becoming curious about. There shouldn’t be a quota on how many good things another person is allowed to experience before we stop being happy for them.
We never see the whole story
Social media gives us a tiny window into somebody else’s life and then encourages us to believe we have seen the whole house. We haven’t.
We don’t see the years of work that came before the achievement, and we may know nothing about the rejection, doubt, setbacks, bullying, harassment or sacrifices that were part of getting there. We weren’t in the room when they wondered whether they should keep going, which means we have very little idea what the moment of the win might actually represent to them.
What looks effortless from the outside may have required far more resilience than we know, which makes me wonder why we can be so confident that we know exactly how much celebration somebody else’s achievement deserves.
What if we just let people have their moment?
What if, instead of pretending jealousy or envy never show up, we became curious when they did?
There is a big difference between noticing that someone else’s success has stirred something uncomfortable in you and deciding that making a nasty, sarcastic or minimising comment will make that discomfort go away. Sometimes that feeling might simply be showing us that there is something we want more of in our own life.
Seen that way, someone else’s success might show us where we have been settling or remind us of something we still care about enough to pursue. None of that requires the other person to become smaller.
Maybe we don’t need to decide whether we would have posted about their achievement or whether we think it is important enough to celebrate. We don’t need to compare what they have done with somebody else’s accomplishments before deciding whether they have earned the right to feel proud. Maybe it’s OK for us to be disappointed for ourselves and happy for the other person at the same time.
If it matters to them, perhaps that can simply be enough.
There will always be people who achieve things we would love to achieve, just as there will be moments when we have something another person desperately wants. Turning every one of those moments into a comparison means somebody will always appear to be ahead and somebody else will always appear to be behind, and I can’t imagine anything more exhausting than constantly keeping score.
I would much rather live in a world where people are allowed to say, “I did this, and I’m really proud of myself,” without immediately feeling the need to make themselves smaller so everybody else can stay comfortable.
When somebody else’s success hits a tender spot in us, perhaps we can resist the urge to do something that hands that feeling on to them. We can sit with it for long enough to wonder why it landed where it did and whether it is trying to show us something about our own life.
Because somebody else having their moment doesn’t take anything away from ours.
Perhaps the bigger question is whether we can let them enjoy theirs while we work out what we want to do with our own.
Bronwen Sciortino is a Simplicity Expert, Professional Speaker, and internationally renowned author. You can follow her on her website, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.
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Bronwen Sciortino, International Author & Simplicity Expert
Bronwen Sciortino is an International Author and Simplicity Expert who spent almost two decades as an award-winning executive before experiencing a life-changing event that forced her to stop and ask the question, ‘What if there’s a better way to live?’ Embarking on a journey to answer this question, Bronwen developed a whole new way of living, one that teaches you to challenge the status quo and include the power of questions in everyday life. Gaining international critical acclaim and 5-star awards for her books and online programs. Bronwen spends every day teaching people that there is an easy, practical, and simple pathway to creating a healthy, happy, and highly successful life. Sought globally for media comment as an expert and working with corporate programs, conference platforms, retreats, professional mentoring, and in the online environment, Bronwen teaches people how easy it is to live life very differently.
