Why does it bother me when someone else is praised?
Someone at the table says a friend's work is excellent. You agree, and you mean it. Still, something in you drops a little, as if a word had been taken from you. Nobody criticised you. Nobody mentioned you at all.
The feeling is hard to defend, so it usually goes unexamined. One of the oldest stories about it is a children's tale: "Snowdrop," as the Brothers Grimm told it.
What the glass actually says
Every day the queen asks her looking-glass who is fairest in the land, and every day it names her. Then one day the answer changes:
"Thou, queen, art fair, and beauteous to see, / But Snowdrop is lovelier far than thee!"
— Brothers Grimm, "Snowdrop," Grimms' Fairy Tales, tr. Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes
Read it slowly. The glass does not say she has grown ugly. It calls her fair, even beautiful. Her face is the same as yesterday. The only thing that has moved is her place.
And for the queen that is everything. The tale says she cannot bear to think that anyone could be handsomer than she is. Fair is not enough when the only title that counts is fairest, and only one person can hold it.
A ranking with one seat
Praise for someone else takes nothing from you, unless worth is arranged as a ranking with a single seat at the top. Then every compliment to another person is a demotion. The existential school would look less at the envy and more at that arrangement. Nobody chooses a ranking like this. It is learned, often early, wherever attention or love seemed to go to one person at a time.
Inside that arrangement, being good is not a quality you have. It is a position you hold, and someone can always take it. That is why the sting comes even when you admire the other person.
Wanting strangers to know your name is a neighbouring wish, and it has its own page. This one is about a seat that only one person may sit in.
What the tale leaves
The Grimms do not explain why the queen needs the glass to say it every morning. They only show that "fair" stops counting the moment someone else is "fairer." The question stays: where did I learn that there is only one good place?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.