If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.
About the author
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), known to readers ever since simply as Montesquieu, was one of the central thinkers of the European Enlightenment.
He was born at the Château de la Brède about 25 km south of Bordeaux. His family was noble, but his parents wanted him to grow up with some sense of ordinary life. They picked a beggar as his godfather and sent him to live with a peasant family for the first 3 years of his life. He was 7 when his mother died, and he later described himself as a shy and withdrawn boy.
Montesquieu studied law at the University of Bordeaux and served as a judge in the local Parlement. Writing was his other life. In 1721 he published Persian Letters anonymously, a satirical novel told through fake letters between two Persian travellers visiting Paris. The book mocked the French court, religious doctrine, social classes, and the reign of Louis XIV. It became an instant classic and was pirated within months. Once readers worked out the author, Montesquieu woke up famous.
His masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws, came out in 1748 after 14 years of work. In it he argued that liberty depends on splitting government power between separate branches that check each other. Thomas Jefferson and the framers of the U.S. Constitution treated Montesquieu as an “oracle” of political wisdom. The Catholic Church responded differently and put the book on its Index of Prohibited Books in 1751.
The line about happiness above doesn’t come from either of those famous books. Throughout his life Montesquieu kept private notebooks he called Mes Pensées (My Thoughts), filling them with aphorisms and reflections on morality, jealousy, boredom, and the puzzle of human happiness.
Montesquieu’s eyesight failed in his later years, and he relied on secretaries for much of his late dictation. He died of a fever in Paris on 10 February 1755.
The meaning of the quote
Most people read this quote as a complaint about envy, though it cuts deeper than that. Montesquieu names two separate things we both call happiness, and shows that only one of them is reachable.
The first is happiness as a state. Enough sleep. Work you find absorbing. A few people you love. A body that mostly works. By that standard, most readers of this article are already there.
The second is happiness as a ranking. You’re happy if you’re doing better than your sister-in-law, your old classmate from school, or the neighbour with the new car. By that standard, almost nobody is happy, because there’s always someone above you on something.
The trick Montesquieu names is that we don’t notice we’ve switched standards. We tell ourselves we want to be happy, then tell ourselves a story about why the new job, the bigger house, or the better-looking partner will get us there. What we want is to win.
We don’t measure ourselves against the real lives of other people. We measure against a fantasy version of them. Their marriage looks easier from the outside. Their job sounds glamorous in a sentence at dinner. Their Instagram feed shows only successes and no Tuesdays.
Psychologists have studied this in detail. Leon Festinger introduced social comparison theory in 1954, arguing that people work out how they’re doing by looking at the people around them, especially when no objective standard is available. 42 years later, economists Sara Solnick and David Hemenway ran a survey at the Harvard School of Public Health. They asked 257 people to choose between two worlds:
About half picked the first option. They preferred to be poorer in absolute terms as long as they were richer than the people around them. Montesquieu had described the same trap 250 years earlier, with no data, just observation.
So what do you do with it?
The practical move is to catch yourself in comparing. When something makes you feel bad, ask: “Would this still bother me if no one else were in the picture?” If the answer is no, you’re competing, not living.
Three small habits help close the gap.
The first is obvious. If scrolling makes you feel small, scroll less. The second matters more than people think. Your week was good if it was better than your week last year, not if it beat someone else’s curated highlights. The third is uncomfortable on purpose. Most people can’t say what they’re competing for, which is a clue that the race might not be worth running.
Montesquieu’s line leaves you with the choice. You can keep wanting to be happier than other people and stay tired. Or you can be happy, which was on offer the whole time.
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