The Washington Monument Problem
The thought experiment that ruins me goes like this: if I’d been born into a different body—shorter, softer, with an entirely different set of physical grievances—I’d still be jealous of everyone else’s version of that body. That’s just how it works. Human beings are calibrated for dissatisfaction at the hardware level.
You can be jealous of so many things. Your neighbor’s freshly leased Audi A3, gleaming in the driveway like a rebuke. The effortless posture of the guy at the coffee bar who clearly doesn’t spend eight hours hunched over a desk. The person who hit the gene-pool jackpot and has never once paused mid-morning to check whether their hairline is doing something new. We’re all keeping score on metrics we’d be embarrassed to name out loud, in company.
Chrissy—an ex of sorts, we had the kind of arrangement that required quotation marks around most of the relevant words—told me over a caramel macchiato that her new guy is built like a civic landmark. Washington Monument proportions, width and height both. On warm nights, she said, they practically need an engineering solution. I asked, very quietly, whether that was medically advisable. Then I said nothing else and stared at the wear pattern in my jeans for a while.
Yes, I was jealous. Fine. I’m not going to pretend I’m unaware of how I measure up—by most international standards I’m doing fine, Asia notwithstanding, and in a decent light I have no serious complaints—but there is something specifically destabilizing about sitting across the table from someone while they describe another man’s body in architectural terms and trying to look like you’re just listening politely. She even told me it’s not as great as it sounds, that the logistics are genuinely terrible, that the romance suffers. Doesn’t matter. The jealousy installs itself anyway and just sits there, warm and stupid and completely impervious to reason.
That’s the thing about the physical lottery: you can’t renegotiate after the draw. No supplement, no surgery, no carefully chosen angle fully corrects for what you weren’t given. And we know this—everyone knows this—and yet the knowledge doesn’t dissolve the feeling. She goes home to her monument every night and I finish my coffee alone and my awareness of the gap improves neither of our situations by a single measurable unit.
I walked home thinking about it anyway. Stood in front of the mirror doing the inventory we all perform and never admit to. And it occurred to me that the whole elaborate architecture of envy—the cars, the abs, the hairlines, other people’s easy luck—eventually bottoms out somewhere embarrassingly specific. I’m not jealous of anyone’s lifestyle or their posture or their casually inherited advantages. I’m jealous of Chrissy’s new guy’s dick. That’s the whole confession. I’ve dressed it up in philosophy, but that’s what it is.