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Saturday's Expiry List...you'll be envious

Saturday's Expiry List...you'll be envious

Shane Cultra
June 14, 2025

You’ll see a common theme for me is not having envy. The anxiety and misdirected drive of being envious of something or someone else wastes precious energy. Once you talk to someone you envy, you find out they have the same envy about other people—and it’s often things you have. I’ll talk to billionaires who wish they could stay in a happy marriage. I’ll talk to successful people who see my daughter in Division 1 sports, going to a good school, and in the case of highly driven parents, getting an Ivy League PhD. I’m proud yes, but that was never the goal. The goal was for her to learn what she wanted to do for a living and gather the skills to be good at it. Whereever that may lie.

My goal was always to be happy, and I set the bar for what makes me happy very low. I learned very early that everyone I thought “was better than me” had the same number of chips—they just had them stacked in different areas. They gave up something for the better results in one area. Sure, you’ll meet those people who are beautiful, smart, and wealthy and had the genetics and cash to get somewhere quicker. But I can promise you that also comes with its own problems. It may not look like it, but it does.

I’ve outkicked my coverage my entire life when it came to dating pretty women. I wasn’t super handsome, but I was confident and not ugly enough to be afraid to ask someone out—and I made sure they had a great time with great conversation. As I started looking for a partner, I began choosing different wants. Beauty was still important, but there were so many other things. What kind of kids would we make? From genetics to how we would raise them. What are her goals, desires, must-haves? Does she have envy? There’s a reason why the divorce rate is so high. People change as they mature, and if you pick a partner based on the same reasons you picked in college, that doesn’t usually play out well. Flexible and timeless compatibility is the goal. Of course, you never really know, but there can be some easy mutual goals. You can also look at their parents, siblings, and upbringing—that will be part of who they are.

What’s important is self-chosen. Why it’s important has to do with upbringing, knowledge, and experience. If you know rich people, you’ll see many are divorced and unhappy—that’s not salvation for them. If you meet poor people, you’ll see that money would only temporarily fix their issues. There’s a lot of culture, bad decision-making, and lack of goals that leads to the unhappiness. It’s disguised as lack of money, but if they had it, they’d often struggle to use it wisely. Then you talk to older people, and they miss two things: their youth and their health. That tells me I should be cherishing and taking advantage of those two things much earlier.

So you get what I’m saying here. Other people are there to add to your journey. They can’t take anything away from you. Only you dictate you. There will be some hard decisions, and it may hurt others temporarily, but better often lies over the barbed wire fence. You may have to move your family for cheaper housing and better opportunity. You may have to do a job you don’t like for longer than you want because it sets the groundwork to do the thing you’ve always wanted. But at no point will anything someone else has become yours through envy. Envy or jealousy just take up the space in your brain where the battle plan to achieve was supposed to go.

Have a great weekend

Quote of the Day: “Envy is the art of counting the other fellow’s blessings instead of your own.” — Harold Coffin

Domain of the DayWDA.com Such a great name. Won’t be cheap but I’ll go a little deeper than normal here

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