A few years ago I watched an acquaintance get a piece of bad news about a mutual friend. A project had fallen through. Just a setback, the kind that happens to everyone at some point.
His face did something subtle. A little lift. Some.. satisfaction? He said something like “Well, did you hear…?”, followed by a deepening of our friend’s narrative. As he told me more, seeming to enjoy articulating the various failures and missteps our mutual friend had taken on their road to the current setback, I became more and more uncomfortable.
Eventually, something about my posture rearranged his face into sympathy, and he said the right things. But I’d seen it. Those flashes of pleasure, gloating at someone else’s stumble.
I didn’t say anything; but I noticed that I started sharing less with him after that.
It took me a while to understand what had actually happened.
This acquaintance had many friends, and seemed well-liked. I wouldn’t have called it cruelty & I didn’t think he was a bad person. He just seemed to live in a world where someone else’s loss was, in some small way, his gain.
I spent much of my 20s being too trusting (the result of a sheltered upbringing dashing up against the rocks of the adult world), and got hurt a fair bit in the process. So I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what makes someone feel trustworthy.
In doing so, I’ve learned to separate people who feel like partners from people who feel like competitors. The ones I actually want to see win versus the ones where I notice, uncomfortably, that I’m ambivalent.
The clearest frame I’ve found is simple: some people operate like wins are abundant. Your success and their success can coexist, even amplify each other. Others operate like wins are scarce; like we’re all drawing from the same fixed pool of tokens, and your gain is a little less available for them.
What’s confusing is that the second group aren’t villains, and they’re often not even unkind. They just have different underlying assumptions about how things work.
Sometimes it shows up as indifference. Your outcomes aren’t in their equation. They aren’t quite against you, they just haven’t bothered to be for you. You’ve been zeroed out.
But sometimes it’s more active than that. They genuinely believe they can’t move forward without someone else moving back. It’s not sadistic, they just think that’s how the math works. They think life is a ranked leaderboard, not a collaborative game. And from inside that belief, certain behaviors just make sense.
I was confused by this for years. When someone hurt me, I wrote pages of journal entries trying to understand why they hated me. I kept looking for malice when I should have been looking for worldview.
The most damage I’ve taken wasn’t from people who wanted to hurt me. It was from people who were either indifferent to my outcomes or who genuinely believed my loss was the price of their win.
Indifference is easy to spot. They just... aren’t there. The competitors are harder to see.
Here are some hints I’ve noticed that indicate when someone is in secret competition with others:
I had a colleague once who would tell me things about mutual friends. Simple “observations.” Who was struggling. Whose work wasn’t going well. Small vulnerabilities, passed along like currency.
At first I thought he was just being open with me. Trusting me with information. And I felt good; I felt like an insider. Later, I found out he was telling people similar things about me, and it stung more because his stories weren’t entirely true. They were exaggerations.
The question I’ve learned to ask myself is: if the person being discussed could hear this conversation, would they feel betrayed? Embarrassed is one thing — we all know our friends find us annoying sometimes. But betrayed, like something was being extracted from them without their knowledge.
There’s a version of talking about someone where you can feel the warmth underneath. You’re frustrated, but you’re for them. And there’s a version that’s purely extractive. The person is being mined for something: status, positioning, alliance.
I try to notice what someone seems to be getting from the gossip. Are they processing, or profiting?
This one took me longer to see.
Some people, when they relay information, leave me feeling more connected to the people around me. More trusting. More like I understand where everyone’s coming from.
Other people leave me feeling suspicious. Isolated. Like I need to watch my back with someone I previously felt fine about.
The information isn’t always wrong, exactly. It’s just... selectively framed. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but...” followed by something that makes me view someone else differently. Conflicts reported in a way that happens to make the reporter look loyal or wise. The slow creation of a feeling that closeness to them requires distance from others.
I’ve started asking myself: when information flows through this person, do I end up trusting more people or fewer? The answer is diagnostic.
Of the three tells, this one concerns me most. Backrooms and triangulation are behaviors — things people do, consciously or not. Schadenfreude is a reward signal. It means the mind is getting something from the misfortune itself.
This doesn’t usually show up in reactions to “big” tragedy. Everyone performs appropriate solemnity when something genuinely bad happens. I’m talking about small stuff. A competitor’s project stalling. A mutual acquaintance’s embarrassing moment. Someone’s “big cool project” not working out.
I’ve started watching for how much people want to linger there. Is there a little too much interest in the details? Do they bring it up again later, unprompted? Is there energy in the conversation that wasn’t there before?
Small setbacks are low-stakes enough that people don’t bother to mask their real reactions. That’s what makes them useful. That’s what I saw in my acquaintance’s face; not intent to harm, but the pleasure in the fact it had occurred.
The tricky thing is that everyone does some of this sometimes. I’ve done all of it. There are people who’ve seen flashes of this in me, and though I’ve rarely been called out for it, I was observant enough to notice their discomfort, which sat with me for a long time.
I'm not looking for saints; I'm looking for defaults.
Where does someone seem to sit when they’re not thinking about it? When there’s no audience, no reason to perform generosity, do they still seem like they’re rooting for me? Does information from them tend to make my world feel larger or smaller?
It’s a matter of degree. But degree turns out to matter a lot.
The thing I keep coming back to is that the behaviors aren’t really the point. They’re downstream of something deeper.
If you believe success is finite — that there’s only so much to go around — then certain things follow. In this world, someone else’s failure is great news. It means there’s a little more available for you. Positioning yourself against them is rational. You’re not navigating cruelly but correctly, given your map of the territory.
And if you believe you can’t rise without someone else falling, then you’ll find ways to make that happen. Not dramatically. Not villainously. Just... quietly. A piece of information shared here. A framing choice there. The slow work of improving your position by worsening someone else’s.
I find this sort of tragic, honestly. Most of the pain people cause isn’t because they’re trying to hurt anyone. It’s because they’re operating from a model that makes kindness irrational. Maybe the model even made sense once, in some other context. But they’re still running it. Their worldview has already done the work. They’re just following the logic.
I’ve mostly stopped trying to argue people out of this. Worldviews are load-bearing. You can’t just swap them out with a conversation. And it isn’t really my job to renovate someone else’s mental architecture.
What I can do is pay attention to how I spend my time.
Time actually is zero-sum. Every hour I invest in an indifferent acquaintance — or worse, a friend who believes my loss is the price of their win — is an hour I’m not spending with people who compound. People who seem to genuinely want to see me win. Not in some performative warmth, but because it brings them joy. My success isn’t threatening to them. It’s obviously good, because they don’t experience the world as a ranked ladder we’re all climbing over each other on.
Those are the people I want to spend my life with. I’m still learning to find them. I’m still learning to be findable by them.