Green goblin strikes again!

"Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies." Gore Vidal put it nicely, except it does not just have to be friends any more. It is anyone.

You know the routine: You encounter someone aged 34 who has just had their fourth book published, or, like the new superwoman Helena Morrissey, read that they have seven happy children while running a £32 billion (Dh229 billion) fund.

When most of my female friends see a picture of actress Kristin Scott Thomas, it reminds them how much they want her life and they get that sinking feeling.

Unfulfilled feeling

Will you go to any lengths to try to keep up with these people, to try to grasp their lifestyles for yourself?

And does the effort to keep up with what you perceive to be their vastly superior lives bring on an unfulfilled feeling? If the answer is "yes", then you suffer from affluenza, a pandemic which, according to psychologists, is afflicting more and more people.

It is not a socially exclusive condition and the symptoms are many. Why do you think Roman Abramovich has commissioned a 550ft yacht, making it the biggest afloat?

Middle-class sufferers deliberately go to the upstairs loo in a house so they can poke around to check the quality of curtains, paintings and beds. Often they will see a flat-screen television affixed to the wall: This is always bad and they go into a sullen decline.

The latest book on the subject of this greenlleyed malaise is Affluenza by psychologist Oliver James (£17.99 or Dh129), who paints a rather dispiriting picture of our material envy. He says it is confected by our schooling, our career and by advertising, driving us to want more and more and feel hollow and dissatisfied when we do not get it.

He says that living a "more-bigger-snacks-now" existence will only drive us crazy. He says we should recall our childhood, when we spent hours messing about in the garden. "That's the place you need to return to," he says.

We should stop chasing prizes of money, possessions, looks, status and fame and start concentrating on intimate relationships and activities in which you lose yourself and your awareness of what others are doing, because they absorb you.

This might all sound rather idealistic, but James does have a point.

Emerging trends

Our fear of falling behind our peers is sending more of us towards a kind of bankruptcy - financial and emotional.

It can affect you on £30,000 (Dh214,774) a year, on £300,000 (Dh2,147,740) or on £3 million (Dh21 million) - people in all these income brackets feel envious of someone tantalisingly above them.

It manifests itself in some social trends such as Stockwell Safari. It is the emerging vogue in dinner parties in the up-and-coming London borough. It goes like this. There are four hosts and each course is eaten in one of their houses.

The central aim is to be able to show off their property.

This neatly dovetails our main obsessions: other people's houses, wealth, taste and other people's cooking. It is a disaster for sufferers but they just cannot help themselves.