A German guy named “Freddy” came to America for the World Cup, and for about 2 weeks he was the happiest man on the internet.
He followed his team across the country with 2 friends and a rental car. He tried ranch dressing. He walked into an American cathedral named Buc-ee’s. He did one of the most southern things a person can do: stand in an SEC stadium watching the eagle circle the field before kickoff, and it brought him to tears. He called the space station. He found, or maybe was found by, a country singer named Ella Langley, and told the world she was his new favorite musician. He kept his face hidden in every photo he shared. So all we had was the joy itself, unattached to a face. The joy of experiencing what makes America, well, America.
And we, the people, loved it. He went from like 11,000 followers to more than 750,000 in less than 2 weeks. Hilton started comping his hotels. Ford slid into his DMs. A company flew him to a concert on a private jet. Senators welcomed him. Governors welcomed him. There was even talk of a White House visit.
And then… the internet did what the internet does.
Someone found out he’d been to America before, so the wide-eyed first-timer thing was a lie. Sort of. He’d been to LA and New York, but he’d never been to the South. Someone pointed out he was a big Ronaldo fan who knew exactly how to ride a trend, so now the whole thing was a grift. “Seemingly organic” got its air quotes. The comps and the jet rides stopped looking like gifts and started looking like evidence.
He wasn’t a happy kid anymore. He was a conman.
And in the first round of the knockout stage, Germany lost to Paraguay on penalties, a huge upset, and then Freddy deleted his account.
He said too many people seemed to have a problem with him and his friends having a genuinely good time. The place he’d been sharing all of it, X, had become too toxic to enjoy anymore. So he took the good thing off the machine and vanished.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
I heard that phrase a lot from my parents, usually when I broke something they recently purchased out of carelessness or spite. I’m sure it was a common refrain for many kids in the 90s. This time, nobody broke anything on accident. We broke it on purpose, and we felt righteous doing it!
My question: why can’t we let each other be happy? Why can’t we be happy that someone else is happy?
Everybody piling on Freddy was right about one thing. There is always an angle on social media. It is fake life. Every single person wears a mask on it. At minimum, a filter. There is always an angle when we present our lives on the internet. Everybody posts the beautiful plate of food. Everybody also crops out the argument we’re having across the table while we eat it.
There is no innocent version of a social platform. There is no virgin feed. The second you sign up, you’re playing a game where everyone is presenting a better version of themselves. So of course Freddy has an angle. Everyone has an angle. That’s the whole game. That’s the whole machine functioning as intended, gamified.
Which is exactly why the outrage makes no sense. If we all know it’s fake, if we’re all running the same play, why get furious at the guy who ran it well and had fun doing it?
This was never about Freddy. It’s about the people in the mob who went after him. A mob that can’t utter the truth out loud, which is: I can’t stand that this kid is happy and I’m not. So we push the blame onto him instead:
He faked it. He’s a grifter. It’s not real.
The accusation masks our own discontent. And here’s the irony: on a platform where everyone is wearing a mask, the most popular mask of all is the one you put on to accuse somebody else of wearing one.
There’s an old and simple word for it.
Envy.
Not jealousy. Jealousy wants what you have. Envy is worse. Envy is sorrow at your good. It is pain that you are happy. The teachers of old noticed something unique about envy that they noticed about no other sin. It’s the only one that gives you nothing back.
Greed enjoys the money on the way. Lust enjoys the moment. Gluttony enjoys the meal. Envy enjoys nothing at all. It is pure ache, plus the small cold satisfaction of watching something good come down.
And now we’ve codified envy. We’ve built a machine that puts every good thing anyone has in front of your eyes all day, ranked and counted and scored. A comparison engine you carry in your pocket that never switches off. If envy is sorrow at another man’s good, then we have built the most efficient sorrow factory in human history, and we plug into it before we’re out of bed almost every day.
Envy is the one sin nobody confesses. Men will brag about greed. They’ll wink about lust. Nobody has ever bragged about envy, because to admit it is to admit you’re small. So it never surfaces as itself. It always comes dressed up as something noble like concern or accountability or “just asking questions” or “he’s probably a fake.”
And I’m in this too. Somebody posts good news and before I can stop it there’s a small acid taste in my mouth that says “must be nice.” I scroll past another man’s joy and feel, for half a second, worse. I have caught myself quietly hoping the good thing somebody else got would turn out to be less than it looked.
It’s basically living in a crab bucket. My reflex is to reach up and drag the climbing man back down to where I am, so I don’t have to feel the distance. To survive my own smallness, feeling insignificant, feeling angry, I need you smaller. Preferably even smaller than me.
And if an internet mob will do that to a German kid over a plate of American hash browns, imagine that reflex unleashed in the real world. It does worse. People tearing down the good they don’t share, and feeling holy doing it. The mob that came for Freddy is the same mob coming for our communities and towns and whole nations. They’re the same animal at different sizes, running on the same joyless fuel. Freddy’s posts are seeds. The society is the tree.
So what’s the cure, if envy is the disease?
The traditional answer is charity. Real charity, the kind that’s actually able to be glad about a good it had no hand in. Paul put it in a single line that’s far harder to enact than it is to read: rejoice with those who rejoice.
It’s the exact opposite of envy, aimed at the exact same target. Envy meets another man’s joy with sorrow. Charity meets another man’s joy with joy. Same event, opposite reaction. One of them is a skill you can practice, and almost nobody does. We imported a German word for the pleasure of watching a man suffer. Schadenfreude. We never came up with a common word for the opposite, maybe because we so rarely need one.
Here’s the thing about the acid in the mouth, though. You don’t choose to taste it. You read something, you see something, you hear that something good happened to someone else, and the acid rises on its own. That part is not a choice. The choice is what you do next. You can swallow it and let it build until it becomes who you are. Or you can spit it out before it sinks in.
Somebody wins the thing you wanted. The trip, the deal, the kid, the good news you were praying for and didn’t get. The acid rises. And right there, in that half second, we decide. You can spit it out, and choose to be glad. Not fake glad. Actually glad. It feels, the first few times, like a small death. Because it is one. You’re letting the part of you that needs to be ahead of him die, so the part of you that can love him gets to live.
Freddy appears to have taken his joy off the machine to keep it alive. Maybe that’s the only place it can survive right now. Unseen and off the scoreboard. But I don’t want to be a man who can only stand another man’s joy when it’s hidden from me. I want to be able to look straight at it and not reach for the knife to cut it down to my size.
Because that’s what envy is: a knife. And here’s why it’s so hard to put down. We hold it because the world is cold, and a blade in your hand feels like the only thing keeping you alive in it. Cutting the other man down to your size feels like survival, the reflex of a man who believes he is on his own and has to fight for every inch of ground he stands on. Why would anyone set that down?
You wouldn’t. Not until someone convinces you the war is over. That you’re already safe. Already loved. That your place was never something you had to win at knifepoint.
The night the mob came for Jesus, Peter drew a sword to defend him. Jesus told him to put it away.
That is what grace does. Grace is the only thing I have ever seen take the knife out of a man’s hand. Everything else just teaches him to hold it politely. To hide the blade behind his back and shake your hand with the other one. To wear the friendliest mask in the room. Never to set it down.
At times over the past two weeks, I felt really happy for Freddy, and for America. It was a nice reprieve.
But today I’m reminded, once again, that we don’t like to rejoice with those who rejoice. And so, we still can’t have nice things.
