Your perception of wealth is determined by your immediate reference group, not objective reality. A business owner with 3,000 employees felt 'middle class' because his peer had 4,000, demonstrating how comparison erodes contentment.

Many successful people maintain their drive by constantly focusing on what's missing or the next goal. While effective for achievement, this creates a permanent state of scarcity and lack, making sustained fulfillment and happiness impossible. It traps them on a 'hamster wheel of achievement'.

While technology improves life on an absolute basis, it paradoxically increases feelings of inadequacy. Social media exposes everyone to the lifestyles of the ultra-wealthy, shifting our happiness benchmark from local peers to a global elite and fueling relative dissatisfaction despite objective progress.

A major source of modern anxiety is the tendency to benchmark one's life against a minuscule fraction of outliers—the world's most famous and wealthy people. This creates a distorted view of success. Shifting focus to the vast majority of humanity provides a healthier perspective.

Society elevates pursuing passion to a moral good, which makes people feel they are 'bad' if they don't have one or choose to leave one. This pressure can trap individuals in unsuitable roles and denigrates other valid, meaningful life paths.

While comparing oneself to successful peers is a known mental health trap, comparing your reality to an idealized, perfect scenario (e.g., making millions while hardly working) is equally harmful. This creates a perpetual state of inadequacy that can cripple performance.

The intense search for a career "calling" has become psychologically parallel to the search for a romantic soulmate. Both are driven by a "don't settle" mindset and create impossibly high expectations, often leading to disappointment and strained relationships when reality doesn't match the ideal.

Humans learn what to want by observing others (mimetic desire). Social media expands our 'comparison set' to the entire world's curated highlights, creating a recipe for discontent. The solution is to be highly intentional about who you compare yourself to, carefully curating your inputs to align with your actual values and well-being.

The idea of a calling has become moralized, making it seem superior to seeing work as a job. This creates a bias where those who express passion for their work are perceived as better performers and more deserving of promotions, even when their output is identical to others.