Stop Begrudging People Their Joy. It Is Not Hurting You.

There is an Instagram post I keep thinking about. A twenty-one year old shared that she bought her first apartment. She was thrilled. She posted about it the way you post about something when you are twenty-one and something wonderful has happened and you want to share it with the world because that is what joy does, it wants to be witnessed. The comments were mostly hate.

She did not earn it. She had help. Must be nice. Some of us are out here working for everything we have. The apartment became a referendum on whether she deserved to be happy about it in public. Whether her joy was appropriate given the circumstances of how she obtained it. Whether she had cleared some invisible bar of sufficient suffering that would entitle her to announce good news without being punished for it. She had not cleared the bar. She was twenty-one and she was happy and that was apparently enough to make strangers furious.

I have been thinking about this for a while now because I recognize something in it that I have experienced in my own life, in a quieter and more personal way, and I suspect you have too. Most of us have been on one side of this or the other at some point. Some of us have been on both. The begrudging culture is so pervasive at this point that it barely registers as unusual anymore, and that normalization is exactly what makes it worth talking about directly.

The People Who Do Not Want to Hear About the Trip

I have family members who do not want to hear about my travel. Not in a politely disinterested way, the way someone might tune out a conversation about a hobby they do not share. In an actively resistant way, as if my describing a meal I had in Greece or a hotel I loved in Italy is a personal affront to them. It is indulgent. I should do something else with my money. Who needs to go to all those places?

This is not a new dynamic. It has been there for years, operating at a low level, occasionally surfacing in a comment or a silence that communicates more than a comment would. For a long time I internalized some of it. I edited myself around certain people. I learned which conversations not to start, which photographs not to share, which parts of my life to keep contained so that nobody had to feel whatever they were feeling when I talked about the things that made me happy. I am done doing that.

Not because I want to make anyone feel bad. Not because I do not understand that people have complicated feelings about money and opportunity and the uneven distribution of both. But because shrinking yourself to manage other people's relationship with your joy is a losing game that has no end and produces nothing good for anyone involved. You get smaller. They do not get happier. The resentment on both sides quietly builds. Nobody wins and nothing changes and you have spent years being less than you are in rooms where it did not actually help anyone.

The question I had to ask myself honestly, and that I want to offer to you, is this: what exactly is the threat? When someone shares something good that happened to them, what is the thing being taken from you? The answer, if you sit with it without flinching, is nothing. Their trip does not cancel your trip. Their apartment does not foreclose your apartment. Their joy is not a resource being unfairly consumed at your expense. The good things in life are not a pie with a fixed number of slices. Someone else eating well does not mean there is less food for you.

This sounds obvious when stated plainly. It is apparently not obvious to a significant portion of the internet, so here we are.

The Culture We Have Built Around “Deserving”

We have developed, particularly online but increasingly everywhere, a very specific and very punishing culture around the concept of deserving. Not everyone has earned the right to good things. Not everyone has suffered sufficiently to justify their comfort. Not everyone's joy is appropriate given the context of a world where other people have less. The right to be publicly happy has become a credential that must be earned and demonstrated and defended against challenge.

This sounds like it is about justice. It is not about justice. Justice would involve actually changing the conditions that produce inequality, which is hard and slow and requires sustained effort over years and does not produce the immediate satisfaction of leaving a mean comment on a stranger's post about her apartment. What the begrudging culture produces is the feeling of righteousness without any of the work, and it does so by making joy itself the enemy.

The twenty-one year old who bought the apartment with help from her parents is not the reason someone else cannot afford an apartment. Those are two separate problems and they have two separate sets of causes and solutions. Collapsing them into one, making her happiness the symbol of everything that is unfair about the housing market, does not advance the cause of housing equity by a single inch. It just makes her feel bad for being happy, which is the only actual outcome of the whole exercise. Nobody's rent went down because she felt bad. Nothing changed except that she learned that sharing good news online invites punishment.

And here is the thing that nobody wants to say out loud: most of the people who received meaningful help with something significant in their lives, a down payment, a co-signer, a family connection that opened a door, an inheritance that changed what was possible, do not lead with that information in the caption. They received the help and moved on and nobody scrolled through their timeline auditing their good fortune for evidence of sufficient personal effort. The scrutiny is applied selectively, to people who are visible, who share openly, who have the audacity to be publicly happy about something in a way that someone else finds triggering.

The lesson the internet is trying to teach is that public happiness is a liability. Keep it private. Keep it appropriate. Keep it proportional to your demonstrated suffering and your willingness to acknowledge that other people have less. Perform the right amount of gratitude and humility and awareness and maybe, maybe, you will be allowed to be happy in public without being punished for it.

I reject that lesson completely and I want you to reject it too.

On Wealth and Who Deserves It

Let me say something specific about wealth because it is at the center of this conversation and it makes people uncomfortable in ways that are worth working through rather than avoiding.

There is a version of wealth critique that is legitimate, necessary, and worth taking seriously. The concentration of resources at the extreme top of the economic spectrum, the political influence that accompanies it, the way it shapes policy and access and generational opportunity in ways that most people never see directly but feel constantly, these things are worth examining and worth changing. That conversation matters and I am not dismissing it.

That is not the conversation happening in the comments of the apartment post. That conversation is not structural economic critique. It is a twenty-one year old being happy about a home and strangers deciding she had not earned the right to that happiness in public. Those are not the same thing and treating them as equivalent is intellectually dishonest and practically useless.

The people I know who have built a reasonable amount of wealth, who travel well, who live in homes they love, who eat at good restaurants and take their kids to beautiful places and build businesses that support their families and create work for other people, are not the problem. They are not the enemy. They are, in many cases, doing exactly what people with resources should be doing: living fully, sharing generously, building things worth building, and contributing to the places and communities around them without feeling guilty about their ability to do so.

I built a luxury travel business. I take clients to extraordinary places and design trips that cost real money and are worth every dollar. I believe that travel changes people in ways that nothing else quite replicates and that the version of travel I design is one of the more valuable things I know how to offer. I am not going to apologize for that or frame it as a guilty pleasure that requires a disclaimer. Beautiful experiences, extraordinary food, remarkable places, these things are not frivolous consumption. They are part of a full human life and they are more available to more people than the begrudging culture would have you believe, and making them seem shameful does not make them more accessible to anyone.

Do I think everyone should be able to travel well and eat well and live in a home that feels like theirs? Yes, wholeheartedly. Is the solution to that aspiration to make the people who currently do those things feel bad about it? No. The solution is to build toward a world where more people can access the version of life worth living, not to shrink that version down until the bar is low enough that nobody feels bad about missing it. Shrinking the aspiration does not raise the floor. It just lowers the ceiling for everyone.

Joy Is Not Tone Deaf

The other phrase I keep encountering is tone deaf. Sharing something good in a difficult time is tone deaf. Posting about a vacation when the news cycle is catastrophic is tone deaf. Being visibly happy when other people are not is tone deaf. The implication is that awareness of suffering requires the suppression of joy, and that anyone who fails to suppress it sufficiently is demonstrating a failure of empathy.

I understand the impulse. The world has real problems and real suffering and there is a version of relentless performative positivity that genuinely is disconnected from reality in a way that is exhausting and alienating. I am not defending that version and I am not interested in it.

But there is a significant difference between being genuinely disconnected from reality and simply refusing to perform constant grief as proof of your awareness and your solidarity. You can know that the world is hard and complicated and that many people are struggling and also eat a great meal and feel grateful for it. You can understand inequality and also take a trip and come home changed by it and talk about why. You can hold the complexity of the world and also be publicly happy about something good that happened to you, because those things are not mutually exclusive and insisting that they are does not help anyone who is actually suffering.

The demand that joy be hidden or qualified or apologized for until the world's problems are resolved is a demand with no end condition. There will always be suffering somewhere. There will always be a news cycle that makes celebration feel inappropriate to someone. If the price of public happiness is that it must wait until there is nothing left to grieve, nobody will ever be allowed to be publicly happy about anything again, and the only people who benefit from that outcome are the people who were begrudging you your joy in the first place. That is not solidarity. That is misery recruiting company.

What I Want for You and for This Space

Meghann Rae exists, in part, as a direct argument against the begrudging culture. This is a place built on the belief that a full life, one with good food and extraordinary travel and meaningful work and genuine pleasure and things worth looking forward to and joy that is shared openly without apology, is not a reward for people who have cleared the bar of sufficient suffering. It is the point. It is what we are here for. It is what I believe you deserve and what I refuse to stop talking about just because some people find that conversation uncomfortable.

I want you to share your joy without apology. Book the trip. Eat at the good restaurant. Buy the thing that makes your everyday life better. Talk about all of it without performing the appropriate amount of self-flagellation to prove you understand that other people have less. Receive other people's joy with generosity rather than auditing it for evidence of unearned advantage. Let the twenty-one year old be happy about her apartment without making her pay for it in the comments.

Not because privilege does not exist, it does and it matters and sitting with that honestly is worthwhile work. But because the version of social consciousness that expresses itself primarily through begrudging other people their happiness is not actually making anything better for anyone. It is just making joy smaller and scarcer and more conditional and more exhausting to share, which helps nobody and costs everyone something.

The version of the world worth building is one where more people have access to the good things, not one where the good things become so loaded with guilt and qualification that nobody can enjoy them in peace. Build toward the first version. Refuse to participate in the second.

The twenty-one year old bought an apartment. She was happy about it. That is the whole story and it is a good one and she deserved to tell it without strangers deciding she had not earned the right to feel that way.

So do you. Go live your life out loud. The people who cannot handle it are not your audience anyway.