Hailey Bieber Made Me Feel Bad About Myself

Jet-lagged, tired, and grumpy after my flight home from Europe, I was on the WSJ website and saw a headline about a woman named Hailey Bieber making a billion dollars. I clicked her picture.

I skimmed the article and found out that Hailey is a 29-year-old supermodel who a few years ago started a phenomenally successful cosmetics company called Rhode. She recently sold Rhode for a billion dollars.

In the article’s pictures, Hailey is a spectacularly attractive human being glowing with youth. In ten-years’ time she will mature into her beauty. In ten-years’ time, I’ll be 73, and gravity, wrinkles, and hair loss will have taken their toll.

I gleaned from the WSJ article that Hailey built up her company Rhode almost single-handedly and is personally involved in every aspect of Rhode’s operations. And after her billion dollar sale, she’s apparently “just getting started.”

I’m retired from business. I’ve never started a company. All I do now is invest passively and hope to preserve what I’ve accumulated. The bottom line is that young Hailey has already achieved far more business and financial success than I ever will.

These thoughts made me feel dispirited. What was the use of my trying to do anything if the world contained people like Hailey Bieber, so obviously and permanently superior to me? (Did I mention I was jet-lagged?)

I can’t say that Hailey is a rival. Nevertheless, I felt twinges of envy at her youth and her success and the perfection of her life as presented by the article. My envy was doubly strange.

• At my current age, I’m not generally envious at another person’s life. In fact, I thought I was over this whole envy thing.

• As well, when I’ve felt envy in the past, it’s been directed at someone who was male and a contemporary, i.e., an authentic rival.

I wondered why this article had been different. My fatigue from the jet lag was part of the answer. But the complete answer, as theorized by evolutionary scientists, is far more interesting.

Envy as a vexing survival trait

In their essay on The Evolutionary Psychology of Envy, Sarah Hill and David Buss write that on the surface, envy appears to be a “maladaptive emotion.” Maladaptive in that envy is “ugly,” it causes distress, and it can lead to destructive behavior. So why haven’t we evolved to rid ourselves of it?

Hill and Buss have an answer:

“[because] it is likely that envy has played an important role in humans’ quest for the resources necessary for successful survival and reproduction over the course of evolutionary time.” ¹

Most (but not all) anthropologists believe that for virtually all of human history we lived in small tribes where everyone knew each other. That sort of small-group, siloed, and communal living still survives today in various aboriginal pockets. And well into the modern era of recorded history, many people lived in small towns and villages where everyone stayed put and knew only each other and each other’s business.

In those small communal settings, you saw your rivals constantly. If you were envious of them you competed with them for mates and resources. If you weren’t envious, you likely lost out in the competition. Maybe you were killed or banished or simply shoved aside. In this way, throughout human existence, those who were envious thrived and had more children than those who lacked the emotion of envy. According to the theory, after tens of thousands of generations of this sorting process, the genes of the envious came to dominate.

So here we are today, envious victims of our ancestors’ genetic success. ²

Repression of envy

Envy is not only unpleasant to the one who envies, it is an ugly and status reducing emotion to show to others. It makes you look weak. Moreover, to admit that you covet what your rival has is to give away valuable information and warn your rival. Better to sneak up on them!

As well, maybe your self-appraisal is too negative, anxiety being another pro-survival trait.³ In that case, if you broadcast your lack of self-esteem, your rivals will happily agree with you. Now you’ve lowered your status unnecessarily. So, my advice is never to confess envy publicly, especially on the internet!

Extending the evolution hypothesis, we are not only the genetic product of ancestors who had the envy trait, we are also the product of ancestors who had the ability to keep their envy a secret from others. Of course, the easiest way to keep any secret is never to admit it to ourselves. ⁴

Fatigue interferes with envy repression

I constantly hear and read about people who are more financially successful than I am and are younger and objectively better looking, male and female. I can usually walk away from those non-real-life interactions feeling fine with myself. In my “social comparison toolkit,” I don’t lack for compensating traits or achievements.

The difference in my envious reaction to the Hailey Bieber article was that in my jet-lagged state of fatigue and disorientation, my repression shields were down.⁵ Which tells me that, despite what I’d like to think, my envy trait is alive, well, and powerful, and that I must spend a great deal of emotional energy repressing it.

For most of human existence––living with limited competition and limited scope for social comparison––envy was a useful survival trait. In current times, it is hard, perhaps impossible, to avoid comparing ourselves with a practically unlimited number of high-status rivals, most of whom we know only through their curated presentations in the media. In the world of 2025, an envious disposition is a liability, not an asset. Yet I suspect if envy could be measured it would be at record levels.

Bieber is not such an unusual name

I showed an earlier draft of this essay to a friend. She laughed at me because my draft included this sentence:

“If I knew Hailey Bieber, I’m sure I’d discover that she has issues and problems to deal with, just like every person I know well.”

My friend broke the news that Hailey Bieber was married to the superstar singer Justin Bieber. I did not know this and neither did my wife. ⁶

My friend also told me that ever since Hailey and Justin have been married, there have been frequent rumors of the Biebers having “issues.” So, in fact, Hailey does have problems to deal with!

That’s not surprising given they are a celebrity couple and conduct their relationship under a spotlight of intense scrutiny. For example, their names and pictures can even appear in random Substack newsletters.

For what it’s worth, I’m rooting for Hailey and Justin. And having seen Justin’s level of sartorial self-confidence in the picture below, I count myself as his admirer.

Anti-envy strategies

One way to think about our natural tendency toward envy is to recognize that we are afflicted with it through natural selection, i.e., through no fault of our own. And that, further, it’s no fault of our own that unlike any other generation of humanity, we are on-line and can sometimes stumble carelessly across depictions in the media of people with seemingly perfect lives. And be fooled!

An additional strategy my wife and I subscribe to, quite literally, is to binge-watch an enormous quantity of fictional television where the themes are murder, crime, medical emergencies, betrayal, and abuse. If you’re able to suspend your disbelief and if you can count the fictional villains and victims as being as real to you as real life celebrities such as Justin and Hailey Bieber, then these television parasocial relationships might just help you suppress your envious genes. ⁷

Streaming is something our ancestors didn’t have recourse to.

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Question for the comments: How do you combat envy?

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1. The Evolutionary Psychology of Envy

2. My explanation is extrapolated from the article cited above.

3.

Sarah Fay

, in her memoir Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses, mentions evolutionary psychiatry, which is how I found out about it. Sarah writes:

“[The mind] is a well-intended machine trying to keep me safe through worry, anxiety, dread, and depression.”

4. The Evolutionary Psychology of Envy

5. Yes, that was a Star Trek reference.

6. Bieber is admittedly an uncommon name but a search reveals that Shane Bieber is another famous Bieber. He’s an MLB pitcher who won the 2020 Cy Young award.

7. If you want to get lost in someone else’s fictional gritty heartache, I recommend Task starring Mark Ruffalo. Task was created by the same person who created the equally great Mare of Easttown starring Kate Winslet.