Emerson’s Compensation is an Envy Killer

On realizing we are living the dream’s of our alternative selves.

For four years of college, everyone is in the same stage of their life: everyone is a student, no one is making much (if any) money and everyone is anxiously waiting for the day they walk across the graduation stage and officially enter the real world.

The minute you and your friends walk off that stage, however, everyone’s lives instantly start to go in a million different directions. Some people get married, some travel, some land flashy corporate jobs, some go straight into a Master’s degree, and others volunteer.

And no one, even those who find the most (superficial) success, can help but compare their lives to those of their peers in those first few years in the real world.

The person who landed the awesome corporate gig ends up working long hours — earning a fat check in exchange for part of his soul — and spends his afternoons daydreaming about leaving it all behind and moving to Bali like his college buddy did.

And that college buddy, on a quiet evening in Bali, tosses and turns at night, wondering if he is wasting his life away. Has he jeopardized his future by delaying his professional career in exchange for “experiencing” his 20s?

And yet a third person who decided to volunteer in a remote area of a developing country after graduating feels they have the worst of both worlds: little salary, little valuable professional experience, and not even the benefit of relaxing on beautiful beaches or traveling the world.

They all wonder if they took the right path, and they all wish they had the chance to experience all the paths they didn’t take. If I had their life, they think as they scroll through their social media feeds, maybe I would be as happy as everyone else seems to be.

But if you follow this perspective to its logical end, you’ll notice something: this means all of our alternative selves who took other paths in life would feel envious of the life you currently live. Had the person who took the corporate job instead gone to Bali after graduation, he would have been left with the same concerns as his friend who did go to Bali and who does have those doubts. And the same goes for the guy in Bali: had he taken the corporate job, he would be sitting at his desk wishing he were out there experiencing the world just as he actually is!

It is this natural tendency towards equilibrium that Ralph Waldo Emerson explores in his essay Compensation. In the essay, Emerson explains that the positive and negative, the light and the shadow, in any aspect of life, are inseparable:

“… The parted water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong things, the moment we seek to separate them from the whole. We can no more halve things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow…”

The light, good things in life, inherently casts shadows, negative counterbalances that help maintains an equilibrium of fortune. Being rich brings freedom but it also requires incredible effort and responsibility. Why not try and find a way around the hard work and responsibility and leave only the goodness of wealth? Almost every lottery winners will tell you from firsthand experience that life doesn’t work that way.

Everything in life has an equalizing element. Cookies taste delicious but they make you fat. Marriage provides stability and familiarity, but it also means losing person freedom. The big corporate job means big money and little personal time. Living in Bali means lots of person time but no upward career progress. Every life choice has its counterbalance.

Compensation is important to read in your 20's because it reminds us that every life, in a sense, is neutral. There is no dream life out there that is all upside and no downside. Every aspect of life, every possible path in life, has as many downsides as it does upsides. Above a certain threshold (having all your basic needs met, no drug addiction), every life is just a different manifestation of finding equilibrium.

And if this is the case, then what sense does it make to compare our lives to others (or alternative versions of ourselves)? What sense is there in wishing your life were another’s while they wish the same back at you? We are all living the life we would be dreaming of if we occupied any other life. We are all living the dream life of our alternate selves.

Once you cross over that threshold of basic needs, there are no “better” lives as much as there are “different” lives. British pop-philosopher and writer Alan Watts has an even more positive outlook towards deciding between paths to take in life:

“You have to regard yourself as a cloud. Clouds do not make mistakes. Have you ever seen a cloud that was misshapen? Have you ever seen a badly designed wave? No, they always do the right thing. But if you will treat yourself for a while as a cloud or wave and realize that you can’t make a mistake whatever you do, because even if you do something that seems totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or other. Then, through this capacity, you will develop a type of confidence, and through this confidence you will be able to trust your own intuition…”

There is no wrong path. No matter what life you end up with — no matter if you were a stock broker or world traveler or newspaper writer or teacher — you were destined at some point to envy another existence. Flipped on its head, this also means your alternative selves would envy your life as well.

That doesn’t mean, of course, you should refrain from making changes to your life. It should, however, change your motivation for pursuing a different life. No matter how many times you reinvent yourself, if you never stop to find peace with your current plot in life, if you never stop to appreciate that you can only be where you have ended up, you will find dissatisfaction in every identity.

True satisfaction is earned through the wisdom of accepting that every ray of light casts a shadow and that every shadow is the result of light shining somewhere.

Got a hankering for more? You can read more of my posts on Letters to a Young Professional, you can check out my blog 12HourDifference.co for my thoughts on launching an international career and you can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter to chat about…whatever you’d like!