Welcome to The Magical Overthinkers podcast, a show for thoughts, firewlers, exploring the subjects we can't stop overthinking about, from burnout to crushes.

If you ever get the feeling that despite living in the information age, life only seems to be making less sense. If you can

connect to the idea that for some mysterious reason, it just feels especially hard to exist as a

human in the world right now, then you're in the right place. This podcast is here to soften the

clash between our innate human irrationalities and the overwhelm of this time.

It's here to help us think less about the things that don't matter and more about the things that do.

I'm your host, Amanda Montel.

Today, we're overthinking about career jealousy.

I'd venture to say that if you clicked on this episode, you might be able to

relate to that stomach-sinking feeling that you're behind in your career somehow, or that other

people have something that you don't, professionally speaking. This is a feeling that I can relate to

all too intimately, and it is so unpleasant. It can

completely overtake your brain. I have spent a lot of my working adult life trying to figure out

what is the source of these feelings of career jealousy, and how can I remedy them?

I read in a 2017 paper titled The Evolutionary Psychology of Envy and Jealousy.

We'll link it in our show notes, that the way most of us experience career jealousy is actually

counterintuitive. Weirdly, we tend not to feel jealous of people who are way far ahead of us

in their careers. Instead, we often feel jealous of people who just have a little bit

more than we already do. So, for example, as an author, I've never felt jealous of someone like

Margaret Atwood or Stephen King or any other writerly living legend. That would feel ridiculous.

Instead, whenever I've had those horrible pangs

of occupational envy, it's always been towards someone who I perceive to be, say, 25 or 50% more

...