The Unfairness of Other People's Lunches
A colleague mentioned drinking two bottles of wine with dinner, then went and bought a burger, a pasty and a cookie for lunch the next day. They don't look like they're paying for any of it. I sat there and sulked.
Someone in the office mentioned, quite casually, that they’d had two bottles of wine with dinner the night before. Not a special occasion. Just dinner. They’ll admit to drinking through the week too, without much ceremony about it.
On the Monday I watched the same person go and buy lunch. Burger, pasty, a cookie thrown in. The full set.
They don’t look overweight. They don’t look like any of it is costing them anything at all.
They’re not alone, either. We’ve got a resident snack-o-holic — always a full-fat Coke on the desk, a couple of chocolate bars going “to last through the day,” which they never seem to.
Same thing. No visible consequence. I sit there and sulk, thinking, why can’t I do that?
I want to be honest about what this actually is, because it’s not simple food envy. I don’t particularly want their burger, or their pasty, or the chocolate bars. If someone put that lunch in front of me, I’m not sure I’d even want it.
What I want is what I imagine it must feel like to eat it without the internal negotiation I go through first. And I want the result — being able to do that and not pay for it — just as much as I want the process to stop being so much work.
Those are two different kinds of envy, and I’ve decided I don’t get to pick just one. It’s both, in roughly equal measure. I resent having to think this hard about food and drink at all, and I resent that it apparently works out fine for other people without them thinking about it for a second.
I know I don’t actually know their full story. I don’t know what they do outside the office, what their next ten years look like, whether anything about this catches up with them eventually. None of that is visible to me. All I’ve got is what I see at a desk twenty feet away, and what I see looks like freedom.
Knowing the comparison is incomplete doesn’t make it stop. I know that and I still sat there sulking anyway.
What Mounjaro has actually done is make me far more aware of the relationship between what goes in and what I’m trying to achieve. I don’t log food. I’m not doing sums at the table. But I’ve started noticing things I never used to — like how much the rum was actually contributing, and cutting it down while still keeping the drink I enjoy. That awareness is useful. It’s also exactly the thing that makes someone else’s apparent carelessness sting more than it should.
I don’t have a tidy conclusion here. I’m not going to tell you everyone has their own struggles, or that I’m playing a longer game they aren’t, or that I should just be grateful for my own progress. All of that might even be true. None of it touches the actual feeling.
I still want to know why I have to think about all this, and they don’t appear to.