"It keeps me going"

You might grant all this and still want to keep the habit, because you suspect it drives you. Without the friend's promotion to needle you, you might never have applied for anything. If you stopped minding, you think, you'd stop trying.

There's something in this. Seeing what others have done can show you what's possible, and rivalry has got plenty of people out of bed. The question is when it helps, and the research is fairly specific about that.

In 1997 Penelope Lockwood and Ziva Kunda studied how people react to someone outstanding. The star affected people only when the field mattered to them. Then it came down to one thing. If the success seemed attainable, because there was still time or because people believed they could improve, they felt inspired. If it seemed out of reach, because the chance had passed or they saw their abilities as fixed, the same star left them, if anything, deflated.

A second line of work looks at envy itself. In 2009 Niels van de Ven and his colleagues studied people in the Netherlands, the United States and Spain and found two distinct experiences under the one English word. In what they called benign envy, people wanted to move up and improve their own position. In malicious envy, they wanted the other person pulled down. The two experiences feel different and lead to different behaviour.

So comparison can help you, under conditions. It helps when the thing is specific, when you believe you could get there, and when your attention goes to how it's done. Now hold the dip up against those conditions.

The dip on the ring road was about as vague as a verdict can be. "I'd like a garden" would have been specific. What you got was "I'm behind", which is a score for your whole self, and there's no next step from it. My guess is that the vagueness is why the dip deflates you. A verdict on everything offers nothing you could attain.

You can test this on your own list. Go down the names and ask what each dip led you to do in the week that followed. Count what you did, and leave out what you resolved to do. I'd guess the honest answer for most lines is an hour on a property site at midnight, a flat Sunday and a slightly cooler text to the friend. If the habit were motivating you, the list would show results.

Compare that with the times someone else's success really did move you. I'd bet they looked different. You saw a particular thing you wanted, you thought "I could do that", and your next thought was about how. Often you ended up asking the person. There may have been a pang in it, but it didn't score your whole life and it didn't last long. It was a wish with a next step attached.

That gives you something to do with envy when it turns up, which it will. Ask it two questions. What exactly do I want from that? And how did they do it? The first usually shrinks the thing a good deal. You don't want your friend's life, with her commute and her boss. You want a garden, or a job with more say in it. The second turns a judgement on you into a piece of research, and the person you envied becomes your best source.

The worry underneath this is complacency. Contentment, the thought goes, is how people stall. I don't see why it would be. Wanting specific things keeps your ambition intact, and it may be in better shape for not spending Sundays being told it's already lost. The person who's at peace with the housewarming and wants a garden is more likely to get one than the person lying awake with a score.