We live on a country lane, in a row of houses that all face the same way.
It’s a nice spot, and the people in it have arrived by quite different routes. Some have been here decades and bought when the prices were, by today’s standards, a rounding error. Others turned up more recently, earn very well, and paid something closer to the real number. Everyone is perfectly pleasant about this. Nobody mentions it. Everybody knows.
On the other side of the lane there is exactly one house. It has more bedrooms than most hotels, and it belongs to a billionaire.
Here is the thing I find genuinely interesting about that. Nobody on our side of the lane is remotely jealous of him.
Not one person. There’s curiosity, certainly. The occasional raised eyebrow when something large and quiet comes up the lane. But envy? None. He is so far past anything any of us could reach that he may as well be weather. You don’t resent the weather.
He also drinks the same beer as the rest of us in the local.
What people are quietly aware of, though, is each other. Who did the extension. Who changed the car. Who, it is gently understood, bought at the right time. All of it within a hundred yards, all of it entirely unspoken, and all of it far more emotionally loaded than the twenty-odd bedrooms across the road.
Which tells you something quite useful about money.
Envy needs proximity. We don’t measure ourselves against the richest person we can think of. We measure ourselves against the people close enough that we might plausibly have swapped places with them. The billionaire is not a rival, because he was never on the same board. The neighbour who is one rung up is a rival, because you can see the rung.
Rory Sutherland puts it better than I can, as he usually does. In Alchemy he offers a definition worth keeping: a rich man, he says, is anyone who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.
It’s a joke that stops being funny about a second after you’ve laughed at it.
Because if your sense of how you’re doing is set by a handful of people who happen to live nearby, or work in the same team, or married into the same family, then it isn’t really a measure of anything. It’s an accident of who you’ve stood next to. Move house, change jobs, and the same bank balance can feel generous or thin depending entirely on the new company you keep.
We see this in the work all the time, and almost never as the presenting issue. People rarely open a meeting by saying they feel behind. They say they’re not sure it’s enough, or they’d like to know if they’re on track, or they ask, with studied casualness, what our other clients tend to do.
And underneath a good deal of that is a comparison nobody has said out loud, usually to someone within about half a mile.
The useful move isn’t to pretend you’re above it. Nobody is. It’s to notice that the comparison is happening at all, and then to ask whether the people you’re measuring yourself against have anything whatsoever to do with the life you actually want.
Because the alternative is a target set by the neighbours. And the neighbours, it’s worth remembering, are working from their own set of neighbours.
The man across the lane is no use to any of us as a benchmark. That’s precisely why he’s such a relief.
We help people in Hook and across Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex and Kent work out what their own number actually is, rather than inheriting someone else’s. It’s usually a quieter conversation than people expect.
Altor Wealth Management LLP is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA number 769033). Registered office: Landmark House, Station Road, Hook, Hampshire RG27 9HA. This article is general information, not personal advice. The value of investments can fall as well as rise.