Neither of which is rational. Your neighbor's lifestyle, no matter how luxurious, has zero material effect on you. If you weren't over the moon when the 401(k) went up $50,000, maybe you shouldn't need therapy when it crashes by the same amount.
Last month The New York Times illustrated the tendency to focus on relative wealth. Reporter Peg Tyre profiled a couple in Darien, Conn.
The husband lost a Wall Street job. The family economized by replacing a full-time nanny with an au pair and taking less-expensive vacations. They still resided in an upscale town, belonged to the country club, had paid off their mortgage and had saved money for kids' college.
Even accounting for setbacks, they lived better than 99 percent of everybody who ever existed. Yet they were stressed and worried.
In the grand scheme, money is less important than other assets anyway, happiness experts say. In the long run, friendship, marriage, education, sex, group memberships and exercise all promote happiness in ways that mere income and consumption cannot.
"I'm thinking about how thankful I am for my friends and family," a top money manager told me in November, during the worst of the financial crash.
It was half gallows humor, a Wall Street cynic's way of saying: I just got wiped out. But it also signaled the shifting values that often accompany economic slumps.
"My advice is to start rethinking where we are getting our message about the appropriate levels of consumption," says Omar S. Dahi, an assistant professor at Hampshire College who also teaches a "Consumption and Happiness" course. "I would say it is highly influenced by the media. It is highly influenced by advertising. This crisis for some people is an opportunity to really rethink some of those things."
This is not to minimize the pain of recession. Losing a house or a job is psychologically devastating, far worse than stock-market losses or temporarily lower income.
And we shouldn't reject wealth and growth altogether. Rising gross domestic product is strongly associated with what does matter: lower infant mortality, better health, longer life span, balanced government budgets.
Wealth is a means to happiness, not an end. Bank statements and sticker prices make it easy to keep consumption score. There is no Dow Jones friendship index.
But Albert Einstein had it right. "Not everything that can be counted counts," he said, "and not everything that counts can be counted."
