In defense of public tumbles
The very interesting thing about a crab bucket is that it doesn’t need a lid.
Any crab in this stinky bucket that begins to climb out is pulled back down by the other grumpy crabs, even though dragging the high-agency crab back down doesn’t really improve the lot of the other crabs. Nobody gets closer to escaping. And the bucket simply remains full, and all the crabs enjoy being crabs in the bucket. We Indians have used this image to describe ourselves for years, usually with this sense of weary familiarity, which is almost like, “Yeah, we know it’s bad, but what to do? We are like this only.” We use it when a relative resents somebody else’s promotion or somebody gets trolled on Twitter for sharing a win or somebody withholds an introduction for no good reason or industries close ranks around people who rise quickly.
We seem to see opportunity as something that must be guarded, even when sharing it does not reduce our own portion or access to it. Sometimes we take deep, deep offense at another person being visibly happy, make them miserable, and then tell them in a very smug tone, “Nazar is very real,” or “Nobody shares happiness.” I think it’s because happiness forces a comparison, and comparison is unpleasant, which is why we start looking for reasons to undermine the happiness instead of trying to understand why the comparison makes us feel bad.
This is also why any time somebody shares a success, it is immediately followed by a very public and very brutal audit of everything that might disqualify or undermine said success. The things that undermine success for us are things that people usually have no control over. Who are her parents? Where did she go to school? Did somebody make a call? Did she pay for admission? Is the business profitable? Is the marriage actually happy? Did she lose the weight naturally?
We are exceptionally good at finding an advantage hidden inside somebody else’s achievement, and obviously many times that advantage is very real. India is an insanely unequal society, and everybody begins at different points. It’s just dishonest to discuss success without discussing wealth, caste, beauty, English fluency, family networks, luck, access, geography, and more. Yet we end up using that advantage very frequently to dismiss everything that occurred after the said advantage. If somebody had help entering the room, we decide that they did not do anything once they entered the room. Privilege and effort become mutually exclusive, and we deny proof from our own lives that they aren’t so. We understand every difficulty we have overcome despite our own advantages, but we look at the other person’s life and treat a single advantage as the lynchpin for their entire success.
I think there’s no other place this gets more beautifully illustrated than with how we engage with influencers. When the Rebel Kid or Apoorva Mukhija announced that she was moving to New York to study at NYU, the conversation around her move fascinated me. I think it’s very reasonable to wonder why a successful creator wanted an expensive American degree, especially when she clearly didn’t have any interest in a traditional corporate career. Apoorva herself spoke about wanting to experience college, wanting to experience living in New York, meeting people outside the creator economy, and learning about operations and supply chains because she would like to start a brand of her own eventually. Now, look, it’s completely within your right to think it’s a bad use of money.
To be fair, that interest did not come from nowhere. Apoorva has built a career by making parts of her life available as content. The relationship is parasocial, but it is also commercial: creators benefit when viewers feel invested enough to care about where they move, what they study, whom they date and what they buy. If she announces a move to New York and an expensive degree, people are obviously going to have questions. The audience’s curiosity is part of the bargain. What is not part of the bargain is permanent jurisdiction. Curiosity explains why people wanted to know what she was doing; it does not explain why every missing detail became an invitation to assume deception, illegality or unearned success.
Instead, people began speculating whether she had paid a donation to get in, asking what visa she was on, discussing when she could legally do paid promotions while studying, how privileged she was to live in New York like she was living. They were nitpicking on every single thing she did, whether it was making jokes about having to live alone for the first time or having conversations about how difficult it is to move to a new country. There was something deeply bizarre about watching strangers conduct an inquiry befitting an ICE agent into the life of somebody that they have a parasocial relationship with. Her admission could not just be an admission. There had to be some secret, hidden reason that she had achieved an opportunity that people on the internet believe she did not achieve.
I don’t know Apoorva or much about her content. I came across her, honestly, when the whole Latent controversy was happening, but my question is: you love her, hate her, think some of her content deserves censure, all of that. Does that give you permanent jurisdiction over every subsequent event or decision in her life?
I think that same instinct drove the reaction to Sugar Cosmetics. The company raised ₹144.5 crore from existing investors at a valuation that was 75% lower than its peak, and that sure is a serious business story. The revenue has fallen, and the losses have widened. The company has proven that brand recognition doesn’t necessarily equal brand growth.
There is a legitimate reason the performance of Sugar attracted this much attention. Vineeta is not simply a founder whose company encountered a difficult period. A substantial part of her public authority now comes from sitting on Shark Tank and evaluating other people’s businesses. When her own company raises money at a valuation 75% below its peak while revenue falls and losses widen, it is reasonable to reconsider how much weight you place on her business judgment. New evidence should change our assessment of an expert. A down round may lower your confidence in somebody’s advice; it does not prove that every insight they ever offered was fraudulent or that everything they achieved before the down round was imaginary.
So much of the conversation moved past the financials of the situation and towards the pleasure of watching Vineeta Singh “lose face.” People claimed the company was bankrupt when it was not. The most popular joke was that she should return to Shark Tank as a contestant and ask the other judges to invest in her. It was not just that her valuation had gone down, but that every piece of feedback or advice she had given across her career was somehow discounted. That gave people the full right to belittle her for the circumstance.
The difference between scrutiny or criticism and a pile-on is fairly simple. Scrutiny is interested in what happened, whether harm happened, and what consequence would be proportionate. A pile-on is interested in making a person smaller and showing them their place. You can question Sugar’s financial performance without making it a point to belittle Vineeta. You can dislike Apoorva, find her irritating, and question her decisions without slating her achievements.
I’m not going to reduce every piece of criticism to jealousy because that would be very convenient for powerful and rich people, especially in a country where genuine corruption and inherited advantage are such a huge reality. Still, just calling something accountability does not make it so. Sometimes we are definitely responding to wrongdoing, but mostly, especially on the internet, we are just trying to cut people down to size because their success has irritated us.
I had always assumed the crab-in-the-bucket mentality was a specifically Indian outcome because of the way we grew up. We learn early that another person’s selection might actively mean our rejection. Scarcity in India is very real, and resentment is a very reasonable response to a society where rewards are distributed so unequally.
That becomes a little more complicated, however, when you realize much of the competition we are talking about right now is basically imaginary. The people on the internet pulling founders down, pulling creators down, pulling women down are not going to get the opportunities they have if they choose not to take them. Most people, especially on the Indian internet, are educated, materially comfortable, and basically people like us, and we all are sitting here spending our day discussing strangers online. Nothing in our lives improves if these women fall.
I can understand that material scarcity has built the bucket for us crabs, but it doesn’t fully explain why we keep each other inside, considering we are not fighting for the same resource anymore.
Are we really like this only?
I went into Google Scholar to do research on this phenomenon, expecting there to be irrefutable proof that Indians are exceptionally crab-like, and it turns out that’s not true. This behavior is called a belief in a zero-sum game. It is this generalized belief that one person’s gain must come at another person’s expense, that there’s a fixed quantity of good in the world, and that whenever somebody wins a part of that good, somebody else loses that good.
This is fundamentally different from recognizing an actual zero-sum situation. For example, when there are a fixed number of seats in an exam, and only a certain number of people are going to clear the cutoff, when one person gets the last seat, another person cannot have it. That is an actual zero-sum situation. A zero-sum belief applies that logic more broadly to life, including situations where one person’s success does not materially reduce another person’s chance of succeeding.
In 2015, researchers studied the prevalence of this belief among 6,138 university students across 37 countries. India scored above the overall average, 3.83 against a cross-country mean of 3.61, and that sounds like, “Yeah, we are crabs,” until you look at the rest of the table. India was nowhere near the top. Taiwan, Vietnam, Ukraine, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico all scored higher. Japan, Spain, Portugal, and Singapore were also above India or around the same range.
The study was obviously very limited. The Indian sample consisted of 104 English-speaking university students, and most participants across countries studied psychology or the humanities.
I think there’s this weird kind of national vanity involved in believing that even our worst qualities can only be uniquely ours. What the data suggests is that zero-sum thinking exists across societies and cultures and geographies, and India appears to be susceptible to it, but nowhere near being the world champion.
What the study also dove into is what causes the belief. In the researchers’ model, lower national income and lower individualism were associated with stronger zero-sum beliefs and together accounted for about 55% of the variation between countries. At an individual level, people who trusted others less, felt they received less from social relationships, had lower self-esteem, or placed themselves lower on the social ladder were more likely to see life through a zero-sum lens. These are obviously correlations, so they’re not necessarily causations, but they do suggest that crab mentality is not an intrinsic cultural artifact, but is more of an adaptation to the fact that our world feels unreliable and that makes it feel unfair.
I read this paper by George Foster, who wrote about what he called the “image of a limited good” in 1965. He did a lot of anthropological fieldwork in Mexican peasant communities, and his research suggested that people could come to see everything worth having as finite. He looked at land, wealth, health, friendship, love, honor, respect, status, power, security. According to him, if these goods were intrinsically limited and ordinary people did not have a way of creating more of them, somebody else’s growth or access to these goods had to invariably imply less for everybody else. When he spoke to his subjects, he found out that they thought that a neighbor becoming richer was not evidence of the fact that prosperity was possible, but evidence of the fact that the neighbor had acquired an unfair share of the wealth.
Still, I do think Foster’s theory is a useful lens to look through because it can help us understand how an experience can become a way of viewing the world. When you encounter enough situations where the pie really is fixed, you eventually start blaming the pie for being fixed and somebody else for taking a larger piece of the said pie.
Now think of how we grow up. We have been told again and again that our pie is fixed. We grow up with entrance exams designed to reject more than they admit, simply because our educational institutes have not grown at the speed that our population has. What is so interesting is that when I was reading applications as the head of the WTFund, the form had a question that said, “Tell us about a time you faced rejection and overcame it. Walk us through your experience.” Over 80% of the experiences of rejection I read in those applications involved people not being able to clear the IIT JEE exam.
Now, these are all cases of educational or skilling institutes, but things do not improve in the labor market either. The ILO’s India Employment Report 2024 found that young people made up 82.9% of India’s unemployed population in 2022, while the unemployment rate amongst young graduates was 29.1%.
Add to that the fact that, according to the World Inequality Lab, the top 1% of India received 22.6% of the national income in 2022–23 and held 40.1% of its wealth. Research has estimated that income concentration at the top today is higher than at any point in their series going back to 1922. People are not imagining that access to opportunity is dependent on family and accumulated wealth. They are literally watching it happen in front of them.
Therefore, scarcity does define a lot of our worldview. People who have very little are not obliged to feel cheerful about someone else’s wealth.
This explanation still, unfortunately, has its own limits. We don’t keep a very neat mental ledger that says, “This lesson only applies to government exams and shall not be used while looking at an influencer story.” We learn the rule that competition is real and then carry it to where competition may not be. When so much of our lives is organized around ranks, cutoffs, selection lists, and being rejected constantly, when someone else’s advancement occurs outside these norms, we still look at it and feel a sting.
Also, material comfort doesn’t automatically end this feeling because our goalposts shift with us. I can have a really good salary, a safe and steady home to live in, and have choices, but I will still feel deprived when everybody else in my reference group appears to be doing better, irrespective of whether they are doing better or not. The object of scarcity changes. It may no longer be roti, kapra, makan. It may be prestige, attention, beauty, access, invitations, a blue tick, a foreign degree or the perception of success and growth.
These things are really positional in nature. All of us can become wealthier in absolute terms, but not all of us can simultaneously have the most wealth, status, attention or access.
This is why we continue living in the crab bucket even when we’ve seen material progress in our own lives. We may no longer want what somebody else has, but we still want to know where we are in relation to their success. Somebody else’s happiness becomes irritating because it changes the goalposts, and their failure makes us feel better because it restores the status quo as we know it.
The pain of somebody else’s good fortune
None of this, I think, still explains pleasure. Scarcity might explain why another person’s success feels threatening, but why does their failure feel good? Psychologists call the pleasure we feel at another person’s misfortune: schadenfreude, which is, of course, my favorite German word because it is more Indian than German. There’s also a less famous word, glückschmerz, for the displeasure caused by another person’s good fortune. First, the success annoys us. Then we begin looking at reasons why the success needs to be “pulled down.” Eventually, when the person stumbles, as they will, because we are human and everybody stumbles, their misfortune is almost proof that we were right about feeling a little suspicious about the success.
Envy is also deeply relational in nature. Most of us will not spend our days feeling personally attacked by Mukesh Ambani’s wealth because his life is so remote from us that we are not going to use it as a comparative. The person who really gets under your skin is usually close enough to you for their life to look like what yours could have looked like if things were just a little different. It could be the classmate who’s obviously not smarter than you but seems to have done better than you, or the colleague who joined the organization at the same time as you did but somehow is doing way better than you. Their success is not about them in your head. It is about the fact that you were living a life that could have looked like this, but they somehow had a secret sauce that you didn’t, and that builds resentment.
There was a Japanese study done where researchers tried to observe this process, and they gave the participants descriptions of people who were either superior or average in areas that were personally relevant to the said participants. What they found out was that envy was directed not towards the most universally impressive person, but to a person who was superior in context to the participant. When that person who was the object of envy later experienced a misfortune, participants reported greater pleasure, and there was also activity in the brain region associated with reward. Interestingly, the strength of the earlier envy was directly correlated to the strength of the later schadenfreude.
Envy by itself is also not a linear emotion. There is a difference between benign envy, which makes us want to improve our own lot, and malicious envy, which makes us want someone else’s lot to get worse. Both begin with the same unpleasant realization that somebody else has what we want. The difference is in the way we try to close the distance between that person and us. The former response says, “How do I get there?” The latter response is basically, “Why is she up there at all?” A crab can respond to another crab’s progress by wanting to learn how to climb, or by making sure that they pull the crab down, because both those actions close the gap between the two crabs.
The second response also becomes far easier to generate when we are persuaded to believe that the successful person does not deserve to be successful.
However, what we underestimate is the fact that the discovery of privilege also offers us a sense of moral permission to enjoy the outcome that we have anyway wanted. It is not generating our want for someone else’s downfall. It is just underscoring it. Once somebody’s success has been classified as undeserved, our displeasure at their happiness has a sense of righteousness to it. We are no longer jealous, but we are simply adding context. If they fail, we are not enjoying their pain. We are simply asking for accountability and then celebrating it. Now, none of this means that criticism of privilege is envy, but it does mean that envy is capable of collating information, and creating justification for negative emotions in us.
This is why I keep coming back to the example of Apoorva and Sugar, right? They’re completely different. Apoorva’s move generated the pain of somebody else’s good fortune. The admission wasn’t just good news for her; it had to be justified in some sense. Sugar’s falling supplied corresponding pleasure because Vineeta occupies the role of a successful founder in the public eye who sat on television and evaluated other people’s businesses. Her company’s difficulties felt like a satisfying reversal of rank. In both these situations, we don’t just want the person to not have what they already have. We want them to experience the status of the people who don’t have what they have.
What I’m trying to do here is examine the appetite behind the interest. Does the interest end once the factual question has been answered? Does the consequence being demanded show any proportionality to the offense? Are we just digging because we want some sense of public accountability, or because it feels good to see someone else fall?
The internet, I think, is very good at blurring the distinction because it gives a sense of private resentment, both a public vocabulary and a sense of community. When we are on the internet criticizing someone, we are not simply being jealous. We are being collectively concerned about merit and legality and authenticity or social justice. The bucket at this point is no longer a response to material scarcity, but a system for managing comparison. Every time a crab falls back, the rest of us crabs feel better about the fact that we can’t climb out.
What the bucket costs us
Now, it’s very easy to say that the people being pulled down are going to be fine, right? Apoorva already has a successful career. Vineeta is going to remain rich, famous, and really, really smart because that’s what she is. A few mean Reddit threads or reels are not going to ruin either woman’s life. There are far more vulnerable people deserving of our attention and concern, and all of that is true. I think what I’m trying to understand here is not whether a successful person can survive public humiliation. It’s what the rest of us learn by watching it happen. There might be a 22-year-old out there who wants to be a founder and sees what’s happening with Sugar and thinks, “You know what? I don’t want my career to turn into a joke like that.” Somebody who is applying abroad and wants to get seen and wants to share that excitement with people is worried that if they do that, people are going to really judge them for it and make them feel terrible about their success.
The person being punished may be fine, but the people watching are learning that it is safer to be invisible than to be visibly ambitious because the latter gets punished, and aggressively so.
One of the things that venture capital will teach you really early is that starting anything in your life requires at least a temporary willingness to look silly. A founder, for example, has to believe in something before anybody else believes in it for it to happen. She has to build consensus with people she hires, people she takes money from, and people she sells to that her company matters. Some of that confidence, if you’re stupidly lucky, appears justified in retrospect, but most of it does not. There is no reliable method of separating justified from unjustified confidence in advance because, if there was, VC would not be an asset class at all. Where the danger emerges is when we start treating confidence that was followed by failure as proof that the confidence was always unearned. Once that becomes a social norm, it doesn’t just deter bullshitters, but it discourages anybody from taking the leap of faith required to look stupid to make something happen.
If you’ve been anywhere around startups, you know that we love failure. We turn it into something that is a badge of honor, but we are constantly told to celebrate failure, fail fast, and be proudly wrong by people who have diversified their own portfolio, so their downside is very limited. For a VC, failure is an asset-class risk. For an employee who is losing a salary because of a downsizing, or for a founder who has spent 5 years on an idea and has no savings left, it feels very different. I think we romanticize failure to another whole deep end, and that is not healthy either. The lesson worth taking away is what I think of as recoverability.
Being wrong in public should be an event in somebody’s life instead of becoming the defining moment of it. I’m not saying you should clap when failure happens, but whoever fails should be allowed to explain what happened, should be allowed to offer repair if they can, and should be allowed to try again without that failure contaminating any future attempts at starting over.
I say this because fear of failure has already prevented a great deal of action. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor surveyed more than 150,000 people across 51 economies in 2024, and 49% of those people said fear of failure would stop them from starting a business, which is up from 44% in 2019. Even amongst people who thought that they saw a good opportunity, 47% said fear of failure would keep them from acting on it. Now, this could be financial or social failure. The survey does not break that down, but I’d argue that social humiliation adds a magnifying lens to the already terrorizing idea of failure.
There was a study that followed the career choices of 2,607 people who had exited unsuccessful businesses across 23 countries. In countries where failure carried greater stigma, especially when information about said failure was easily available, these failed entrepreneurs were less likely to return to entrepreneurship. We, as a society, lose so much of potential if only the unusually talented or financially protected can try again.
I think a really good example of a societal contract that defines this is bankruptcy law. A study that covered 15 European and North American countries between 1990 and 2005 found that more forgiving personal bankruptcy laws were associated with far higher self-employment. The shorter the time it took for someone to be discharged from old debt, the faster they went towards a fresh start. Imagine if we thought like these bankruptcy laws: failure happened, and you went through it, but now you’re absolved, and you can start again. If failure does not carry permanent financial and social consequences, experimentation becomes available to far more of our population.
What if we decided to learn from failure instead? Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach conducted five studies using eleven different samples and found that people consistently shared failures less readily than they shared successes, including those situations where people could learn from those failures. In one experiment, simply pointing out the failure that contained some useful information made participants more likely to share it. When every failure or perceived failure gets delivered as a punchline, we get very sanitized postmortems. Nobody tells us when warning signs first happened, when their assumptions turned out to be wrong, or how long it took to realize how bad things were. If we had better language to talk about failure, this knowledge would not be lost.
This creates an ecosystem in which success is very visible and failure stays concealed until it can no longer be hidden, either because circumstances force it into the open or because somebody else takes pleasure in exposing it. Everybody else then receives a completely distorted picture of how progress happens. What ends up happening? We look at people who speak from the middle with a lot of suspicion. We demand that people build in public, show vulnerability, and be authentic, and continue cataloging everything they say without giving them an inch to make mistakes or look stupid. The rational response to such behavior is to stop being authentic.
This is particularly damaging in a country like India, where we are really desperate to produce more entrepreneurs because we offer very little protection from entrepreneurial risk. When failure means debt, damage to employability, public humiliation, and becoming a laughing stock, anybody without any sense of inherited cushioning will make the sensible decision to avoid it. The culture that claims to expose privilege ends up reserving experimentation for the privileged because the privileged are the people most capable of surviving public loss. Everybody else will choose conservative paths because they are afraid of any failure being public. We then go ahead and complain that Indians do not take enough risk, as though risk appetite is not a function of the response any attempts at risk get.
Any society that wants ambitious people has to make room for that ambition. That room does not require pretending that every founder is a hero or every failed company is a lesson. It just requires the ability to distinguish a bad outcome from bad conduct. Fraud and harm deserve punishment, but ordinary misjudgment just requires enough honesty to learn from it and enough mercy to allow a person to try again. When every public fall becomes an opportunity to retroactively declare that the person didn’t deserve to rise in the first place, the crab bucket will only have crabs that are sensible enough to stop climbing.
At some point, you have to snap out of it
We have been trained by our perceived scarcity to believe that another person’s selection is connected to our rejection, because it very often is. However, that explanation has eventually become an alibi.
We may not control the first sense of discomfort or envy that arrives when somebody else succeeds, but we have a lot of control over what we do next. We can sit with that feeling, we can identify what it exposes about ourselves, and we can decide that we want to act on that information instead of just reacting to it. Or we can be the kind of people who spend 3 hours on Reddit trying to create moral justifications for why we are not as successful as the person we are jealous of.
You are reading this essay. You are most certainly not as powerless as your resentment allows you to feel. Many of us can still be disadvantaged relative to the people we compare ourselves with while holding extraordinary advantages relative to most of the country. If you have access to the internet, enough English to read this insanely long newsletter, and enough leisure to have opinions, you probably have some agency over what happens next in your life. None of that, of course, cancels your hardship. It does mean that people like us should examine how much of our sense of deprivation is produced by the reference group that we have chosen to be a part of.
I’ve always found the language around abundance mindset a bit skeevy because it is sold as this magical substitute for material abundance. Somebody who can’t pay rent does not need a gratitude journal. India does not have more university seats because we visualize them. Material scarcity has to be solved materially through better institutions and fairer distribution of resources. Still, we can stop applying the logic of scarcity in spaces where it serves no purpose. It makes me uncomfortable, but we, at some point, will have to realize that we cheer losses that produce no corresponding gain for us.
I grew up being that young kid in the room. I’m no longer that young kid in the room, and I get jealous. I have watched people younger than me receive opportunities I wanted, and immediately began looking for reasons that their achievement was less impressive than it appeared. Sometimes I have found a valid reason, but more often than not, it has just been my jealousy. I know the relief of discovering that somebody had help or knew the right person or had the right access, because that discovery allows me to protect the story I tell about my own ability. This essay exists in large part because I recognize this instinct in myself, and I’m increasingly suspicious of how quickly that instinct emerges because of easy access to the internet. What I’ve realized is that very often, when I say something like, “He does not deserve it,” what I actually mean is that I wish that happened to me.
Once I admit that I wish something had happened to me, the problem returns to my own life. I have to decide whether I want the thing enough to rearrange my choices around it. Sometimes I realise that I do not want the work, risk or trade-offs involved. I only want the status attached to the outcome. That is useful information as well. Somebody else’s downfall offers a much easier form of relief because it asks nothing from me. The distance between us shrinks without my having to move. For a few minutes, I feel less behind. Then I return to the exact life I had before, except that another person is now slightly more miserable inside it.
The answer, obviously, is not compulsory enthusiasm for every success. Some people acquire wealth through exploitation. Some public figures cause harm, and power deserves scrutiny because power allows people to escape it. When harm exists, naming that harm and asking for a consequence proportional to it is very fair. What we should stop doing is stretching that criticism until it becomes this sort of open-for-all permission to just hate everybody and everything better than you. Watch yourself the next time someone gives you any happy news. Are you just happy for them, or are you running this checklist in your head about all the ways them being happier was easier than you being happier? When I did it, I was very embarrassed because I realized I had become a very small, mean person.
We should continue to fight the conditions that keep us in scarcity. India needs stronger public systems and very many more routes to respectable lives. Inequality requires redistribution, not recreational cruelty. However, recreational cruelty towards somebody who has more than us does nothing of the sort. Mocking Vineeta is not a wealth tax, investigating Apoorva Mukhija does not democratize foreign education, refusing to celebrate a friend’s promotion does not produce another promotion for you, watching someone getting canceled online doesn’t make you better than them. We can have serious politics about the distribution of opportunity while refusing to behave like every successful person has personally snatched an opportunity out of our hands.
We don’t have to be relentless cheerleaders for anyone. I would simply like us to be less emotionally invested in the idea of a stranger receiving their “just deserts.” I would like us to notice when criticism stops looking for accountability and starts producing pleasure. I would like us to be better people for our own sake, not for anyone else’s.
The bucket is very real. It contains genuine scarcity. Some of us are much closer to the bottom than others. Still, every time we reach for the leg of someone climbing out, we make a choice about what sort of place the bucket will be. If you have enough time and agency to investigate a stranger’s visa or a founder’s down round, you have enough agency to redirect some of that attention to your own life. Scarcity may have built the bucket, but it does not require us to keep it full just so that we feel better about being inside it.