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Chapter 4: Ten Lunch Boxes, a Hundred Students

Part Two: Why You Can See It and Others Can't ｜ 📖 Who's Collecting at the Door ｜ 📖 Full Edition

Chapter 4: Ten Lunch Boxes, a Hundred Students

1. The Steakhouse Downstairs​

Below my apartment there is an upscale dry-aged steakhouse where a steak costs several thousand dollars. I normally can't bring myself to eat there, but there are always people going in. Whether they are genuinely rich or only putting on a show, they eat their feast, and it has no effect on how I live my day. Whether that restaurant exists, and who eats there, doesn't touch me.

The reverse holds too: when you see someone living simply, there is no need to look down on them. As long as they aren't blocking your doorway, if they eat pan-fried buns or bread at every meal, that is their choice and their rhythm. Their eating pan-fried buns doesn't automatically make my food better.

Does someone else doing well really mean your resources have been taken? If this restaurant closes, you can eat at another. Someone else eating a top-grade steak doesn't leave you to starve; when they eat steak, you can order steak too, and if you don't want steak, there are pork chops, ramen and every other kind of choice. In such a world, comparison is meaningless, because other people's abundance doesn't directly lower the quality of your life.

Yet at school and at work, most people are intensely absorbed in peer rankings and internal competition, caught in the grind of "flattering those above and trampling those below." Many people would say this is because everyone is petty and can't let things go. I used to think so too. Later I found that explanation was only half right.

2. Ten Lunch Boxes, a Hundred Students​

Imagine a school tuck shop with only ten lunch boxes at noon and a hundred students. If someone else buys one, you really do go without. This is structural scarcity: capacity is fixed, places are limited, and someone else's gain is your loss.

In a place like this, comparing yourself to others is an accurate reading of your situation. Telling the student fiftieth in line "don't compare yourself with others, just live your own life" is telling them to keep their dignity on an empty stomach.

So comparison and anxiety actually have two sources. One is applying a zero-sum frame to a world that isn't zero-sum: someone else eats steak, and you feel robbed. The other is that you really are standing in a tuck shop with only ten lunch boxes. The first can be solved by letting go; the second can't.

The difficulty is that there is a third case, more common and harder to recognize: a place that wasn't zero-sum, remade into one.

3. Two Prices Under One Roof​

Suppose the owner of one kitchen hangs up two signs: one restaurant goes upscale and charges ten times as much; the other is cheap. The two have the same décor, the same seats, and serve the same food from the same supply chain. The rich go into the upscale one; everyone else goes to the cheap one.

In this case, no one is jumping anyone's queue. The rich paying more for a name and convenience is, at bottom, a kind of market fairness. The two restaurants run separately and their capacity doesn't overlap; when the upscale one is full, the cheap one is not one second slower.

But do it another way and things change. The owner merges the two restaurants into one queue under one roof and gives customers ordering from the expensive menu absolute priority: ten groups of high-paying customers are seated in a row before one group of budget walk-ins. The food that goes into everyone's stomach is identical and the service is no different; the only difference is that the others paid extra for the right to cut the line.

At this point, what the restaurant is selling is your waiting time; the food is incidental. Seats are fixed, so every step forward for a high-paying customer is a step back for a budget one. The "speed" the rich buy is in fact paid for by the people in line, with their time.

The most important step is this: how much priority is worth depends on how long the ordinary line is. The longer the ordinary line, the easier the fast lane is to sell, so the restaurant has an incentive to deliberately slow the budget side down, for instance by letting in only one group in ten. The economists Raymond Deneckere and Preston McAfee studied this tactic and called it "damaged goods": deliberately making the cheap version worse to push people to upgrade.1 Same food, same service, and yet you must wait, precisely because the wait is itself the product.

This practice is not rare. Theme park fast passes and paid express lanes on American highways follow the same model. The philosopher Michael Sandel devotes an entire chapter of What Money Can't Buy to this kind of paid queue-jumping.2

Real life has an even more refined version: membership tiers. Spend a certain amount in a year and you are upgraded to a gold, platinum or diamond card, and the order of the queue follows card tier. Diamond members barely queue; customers without a card have to show up hours early to get a number.

This version differs from paid queue-jumping in one key way: priority is bought not with the money spent on this meal but with past accumulated spending. Airlines take this furthest: at one large Taiwanese airline in 2026, for example, members of the top tier board even before passengers in the highest business class.3 The person paying the most right now can't get ahead of the person who paid the most in the past.

And once you have a tier, it is hard to lose. Few members are downgraded for falling short in a single year; usually it takes several years of missing the threshold, or missing it by a wide margin. In the pandemic years of the early 2020s, many members couldn't come close to the threshold, and businesses didn't dare touch their tiers. In other words, card tier is a stock: those who accumulated early keep their position even if they stop spending; newcomers have to climb from the bottom. This is Chapter 3's floor, only in the form of a card.

For the business, this privilege costs almost nothing. The time diamond members save is paid on their behalf by cardless customers at the door; the business rewards its regulars with other people's waiting.

Membership cards have another layer: price. Member days, birthday gifts, double points, member prices; the labels are endless, and people without a card get none of them. Even closing-down farewells are tiered: before one Japanese barbecue chain closed a branch, its member rebate was about 5% for basic members, 15% for silver, and as much as 20% for gold.4

This looks reasonable: regulars come more often and get a bit more back. But the same price structure can be described two ways. A member price can be "a discount for regulars" or "a surcharge on non-members"; the only difference is where the "original price" is set, and the business sets it. In the early days, American credit card companies insisted that if a shop charged differently for card and cash, it could only call the difference a "cash discount," never a "credit card surcharge"; the behavioral economist Richard Thaler used this example to show that the same price gap, described differently, feels completely different.5

So to judge whether a member price is fair, the question is not how big the discount is but what the baseline is (see Chapter 6): has the "original price" paid by people without a card been raised, compared with competitors or with before the membership scheme? If so, it is another version of the queue, where non-members pay not with time but with money.

Of course, membership schemes have a fair version too: you collect points by spending and exchange them for food or discounts. The key is that the reward is linear: every dollar earns the same points, whether it's your first day or your tenth year. Such a scheme doesn't touch the order of the queue or make anyone pay with their time; at bottom it is a deferred discount, and like the two separate restaurants, what you get doesn't affect anyone else.

Tiered schemes are different. The higher your tier, the more each dollar earns and the further forward you stand; the reward grows with past spending. Linear points reward the money you spend this time; tiers reward the position you have accumulated.

Even with points, two things deserve a look: whether the "original price" has been raised to pay for the rewards, and whether the points expire before most people can redeem them. Points that can't be redeemed are income for the business and only a promise for the member.

Many people think all this is fair. Others can buy a membership, and so can you; others can buy a fast pass, and so can you; no one is stopping you. That argument holds for two separate restaurants, because whether you buy has no effect on anyone else. In a single queue it fails: the fast lane is fast because most people haven't bought it. If everyone bought it, everyone would be back in the same line and nobody would be any faster. This is exactly Hirsch's stadium from Chapter 3: the whole crowd stands up and no one sees any better. For something that is valuable only when most people don't buy it, "you can buy it too" is a promise that never has to be kept.

The French writer Anatole France made a famous ironic remark: the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.6 No one stopping you from buying the fast lane is the same kind of fairness as no one stopping you from sleeping under a bridge.

My strategy with businesses like this is simple: judge it by its high price, and seriously ask whether the meal is worth that much. If I have to wait at the door until everyone willing to pay big has eaten and left before my turn comes, that is simply a waste of my life.

4. Zero-Sum by Design​

Put the steakhouse and this restaurant side by side, and the answer is clear: zero-sum is not necessarily the nature of the world; it can be designed. Put consumption that had nothing to do with each other into one limited capacity, then sell places in the queue, and other people's abundance really does become your waiting.

School and work are exactly such places.

A degree is a positional good whose value lies only in being higher than someone else's (see Chapter 3). Rankings, quotas and top streams turn something everyone could learn on their own into ten lunch boxes for a hundred students. What cram schools sell is, to some extent, a fast lane: they don't guarantee you will learn more, only that you will stand ahead of others in line.

The workplace is the same. In a company still expanding, the pie is growing and your colleagues are teammates; in a company that has stopped expanding, the pie is fixed, and the person sitting next to you is the one most directly splitting it with you (see Chapter 5). The root of "flattering those above and trampling those below" is that the structure puts everyone in the same line and hands the power to let people through to those above.

Platforms are the same restaurant. Organic reach is the budget line; ads and paid verification are the fast lane; the more organic traffic dries up, the better the fast lane sells (see Chapter 8).

So when facing comparison and anxiety, the first question should not be "why do you care so much about other people?" but "what kind of place are you standing in?"

5. Why Some See It and Others Don't​

In the same world, some people feel it isn't zero-sum at all and others' anxiety is just overthinking; others feel everything is zero-sum and "let it go" is easy talk from the sidelines. Both are being honest; they are just standing in different places.

People inside the separate restaurant genuinely can't see the queue. They eat their steak, others eat pan-fried buns, everyone gets along, so they say: the world is big, why compare? People in the shared line watch others cut past them every day, so they say: the world is dog-eat-dog.

This is positional sampling. When your position lets you see only one kind of person and one set of rules, you think the world contains only that kind. The reverse is also true: people working at normal companies genuinely can't see the zero-sum games that have been designed, and think the critics are exaggerating.

There is a scene in the 2026 Hong Kong film Night King (《夜王》). After work, a hostess played by Wong Tan-ni (王丹妮) tells Sister V, played by Sammi Cheng, that this line of work pays well, but from now on she will never trust a man again. Sister V replies that it isn't as simple as not trusting men: happiness won't come to you that easily.7

The men they see every night are the kind who walk into nightclubs. From their position, no longer trusting men is a conclusion drawn from years of sampling, not an exaggeration at all; someone who has never set foot in a nightclub would hear it only as prejudice.

Sister V's line goes one step further than sampling. What your position changes is not only how you see others but what you think your own life can hold. See too much of one kind of person, and in the end even happiness is judged as something that won't happen to you.

Sampling has another limit. Many people's eyes stay fixed on their own small patch, imitating their bubble or people one or two rungs above them. All the competition is sideways; the people who actually set the rules of the queue are out of sight (see Chapter 3). If you only compare yourself with the person next to you, you can't see who is selling the fast lane.

That is what this part of the book is about: why you can see what others can't, and why others can see what you can't.

6. Three Questions​

Next time you find yourself comparing yourself with others, ask three questions first.

  1. Is there really a fixed capacity here? Or am I treating someone else's steak as my own loss?
  2. If capacity really is fixed, who decided the rules of the queue? Are the quotas, rankings and priorities natural, or did someone design them?
  3. Am I paying with money or with time? Who is collecting from my waiting?

If the answer to the first question is "no," then you really can let comparison go and live your own life. If it is "yes," it is a structural problem that attitude can't solve; telling yourself to let it go only recasts someone else's toll as a failure of your own character.

As for whether to stay in that line, my answer is the same as with the restaurant: judge it by its high price, and leave if it isn't worth it. Only remember that when every restaurant switches to the same queuing system, "leaving" is not so easy. Seeing clearly what kind of place you are standing in is the first step of choosing, not the last.

← Chapter 3: Every Exit Charges the Same Entry Fee, and It Is Called a Floor📖 Back to ContentsChapter 5: You Didn't Meet a Villain, You Met a Structure With No Money to Share →

Footnotes​

  1. Raymond J. Deneckere & R. Preston McAfee, "Damaged Goods," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 5(2), 1996. ↩

  2. Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, Chapter 1, "Jumping the Queue." Taiwanese Chinese edition: 《錢買不到的東西：金錢與正義的攻防》. [Chinese edition details to be checked] ↩

  3. EVA Air, "Infinity MileageLands Diamond Card Member Privileges," https://www.evaair.com/zh-tw/infinity-mileagelands/about-infinity-mileagelands/tiers-and-privileges/membership-benefit/diamond-card/ (accessed October 2026) [in Chinese]. ↩

  4. Sing Tao Daily (星島日報), "Gyu-Kaku Closing Offer: Siu Sai Wan Island Resort Mall Branch Says Goodbye in August, Members Get Up to 20% Cash Rebate," July 2026, https://www.stheadline.com/food/3594686/ [in Chinese]. ↩

  5. Richard H. Thaler, "Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 1(1), 1980. ↩

  6. Anatole France, Le Lys rouge (The Red Lily), 1894. ↩

  7. Night King (《夜王》), directed by Ng Wai-lun (吳煒倫), starring Dayo Wong and Sammi Cheng, 2026. The dialogue is paraphrased by the author, not quoted verbatim. ↩