The Power of Envy: What Ashton Hall’s Viral Morning Routine Tells Us About Turning Comparison into Personal Growth
Long before the sun rises, Ashton Hall's morning unfolds like clockwork–countless rituals carried out day after day in a routine that is anything but ordinary. You’re probably thinking that “excessive” is the right word to describe the content of this recently viral influencer; My face twisted with confusion as I watched a man on Instagram wake up at 3:00 AM to dunk his face in ice water until 3:10, stand on his balcony until 4:00, eat a banana and wipe the peel across his face until 4:30, dunk his face in another bowl of ice water, this time lemon infused, until 5:00, rub those lemon peels all over his body before he eats them until 5:10…and so on (Hall, 2025).
Ashton Hall’s content is meant to satirically exaggerate productivity and success through morning routines–a genre that has become popularized on the internet over the past few years where influencers show-off their “morning routine that made them a million dollars,” for example. Wheather or not you agree with the extremity of Ashton Hall’s routines, there is a clear reason for why he went viral, and for why the whole genre of “routines/day-in-my-life” became so popular to begin with: they glorify productivity, elevating it to an ideal of perfection and curation that we find irresistible, regardless of if it’s obviously satire, like Ashton Hall’s routine, or earnest content, like the countless “day-in-the-life” videos of college students balancing early classes, gym sessions, and perfectly organized study schedules. The fact of the matter is that this “glorification of productivity” attracts us to this content like moths to a flame because they represent what we aspire to be, or more accurately, what we envy our lives to resemble: flawlessly structured, efficient, disciplined, and seemingly without imperfection.
❝Envy isn’t a flaw–it’s part of the system. Evolutionary biologists argue that envy evolved as a social GPS, guiding us toward what seemed necessary for survival: status, attention, and resources.❞
We are envious of this content not only because of what they do but how effortlessly they seem to do it. Before we know it, we are left orbiting other people’s curated lives, routines, and dreams from a distance, watching but never breaking free for our own goals.
What’s especially jarring about some of these videos, primarily morning routine-related content, is the way that they depict what success should look like. Ashton Hall regularly represents himself as wealthy in his videos: he walks around in designer, has at least two bodyguards/servants around him at all times in public, shows off his luxury cars, and goes through countless bottles of premium Saratoga water, which he wastes profusely. It enforces the false narrative that we can’t be successful, achieving our dreams and aspirations, if we don’t wake up excessively early and work out/eat healthy. If a morning in the life of someone wealthy looks like that, then that must be what I have to do to become that successful! People buy into this “false narrative” because there is some truth to it: to be able to be this disciplined about your health is a version of success. But that’s the problem: success is defined differently for everyone and requires having different priorities, which may not be health. The falsity that some morning routine is the key to setting ourselves up for success is so convincing because it’s grounded in the truth of health success. Of course, you can have both: success in your dreams and success in health, which may or may not involve a morning routine. The point is that a morning routine isn’t necessarily what actually leads to success: Steve Jobs wasn’t successful because he ran a 5K at 5:00AM, he was successful because he founded Apple (shocker: there was no 5K morning run). Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t successful because he did 100 push-ups daily in Harvard Square, he was successful because of Facebook (another shocker: there was no morning push-up workout). The allure of starting the day with a extensive morning routine, often hailed as a symbol of success, blinds us to a crucial truth: these routines rarely have anything to do with creating success in the first place.
That said, while envy can lead to misunderstandings about what success looks like for you, there is still a bright side to envy. And maybe there is a balance of feeling envy where we don’t lose ourselves in comparison while still realizing our potential for personal growth and staying true to our own path…
Envy has a terrible reputation. It’s one of the seven deadly sins, the poison behind countless betrayals, and the emotion people are ashamed to admit feeling. We’re told from a young age that jealousy is ugly, that we should be happy for others instead of resenting their success. But what if envy isn’t the enemy? What if, instead of something to suppress, envy is actually one of the most powerful forces for personal growth?
Envy has fueled some of the greatest breakthroughs. Would Tesla have competed so fiercely with Edison if he hadn’t envied his influence? Would the space race have existed without the United States and the Soviet Union envying (or even fearing) each other's scientific advancements. In fact, I argue that envy signals ambition: both the Soviet Union and the United States were driven by the desire to dominate space-related scientific advancements in the 1950s and ‘60s, envying each other’s progress because both ultimately aspired to be the most advanced nation in the world (Davis, n.d.). In this scenario, envy lead to an explosion of space technology advancement which would lead to decades of breakthroughs.
❝Often, when we envy seemingly disciplined and productive lives on social media, what we’re really envying aren’t their achievements or what they have, but their drive and urgency–qualities we wish to have for our own goals.❞
Envy stems from negative social comparison with someone perceived as “superior” in some way. This feeling often drives the individual to close the “social gap” between themselves and the other person by either seeking inspiration and self-improvement to rise to their perceived “level” or by resenting and undermining them to bring them down closer to your own perceived “social position.” Put simply, an envious person either strives for greater abilities and achievements or wishes for the other person to lose theirs. In this way, envy isn’t a flaw–it’s part of the system. Evolutionary biologists argue that envy evolved as a social GPS, guiding us toward what seemed necessary for survival: status, attention, and resources. We learned to measure ourselves by others because that’s how we knew what was possible (Yang, 2021). By noticing what others had and pursuing it ourselves, envy became a crucial emotion for driving competition, innovation, and the development of skills essential for thriving in social groups.
Most people assume that envy is purely destructive, leading to bitterness, self-pity, or even sabotage. The difference between resentment and inspiration due to envy is subtle–both involve recognizing that someone else has something you don’t. The only difference is how we react to it. Envy, when harnessed correctly, can push people to improve. Take sports, for example. A player who watches a rival outperform him faces two choices: wallow in jealousy or channel that envy into motivation to train hard and improve. At first, that player focuses outward, recognizing that their rival has something they lack–a stinging realization. That’s envy. From there, he can either succumb to resentment or use to as fuel to train harder and return stronger. Envy is the discomfort that tells us we want something badly, it reveals what we secretly desire: someone might workout because they envy the muscular body that someone else has. By analyzing envy, we can learn what we truly want in life and whether we are willing to work for it.
Envy stings because it reminds us of what we lack. But the real question is: what type of person are you? Do you let envy fester into resentment, or do you transform it into the excitement of what’s possible and take action? In today’s age of social media, filled with carefully curated morning routines and day-in-the-life videos, comparison to other people’s lives is unavoidable–it’s out of our control. What is within our control is how we interpret these comparisons and distinguish between what these videos depict as success and what we, personally, think success looks like for us. The danger lies in losing sight of our own definition of success by trying to mimic routines tailored to someone else’s ambitions.
Often, when we envy seemingly disciplined and productive lives on social media, what we’re really envying aren’t their achievements or what they have, but their drive and urgency–qualities we wish to have for our own goals. Instead of fixating on what they do, we should focus on how they do it: with discipline, passion, and relentless consistency. Knowing this, we can harness envy as a tool to fuel our own growth and work towards our version of success–because time is ticking, and our dreams are waiting.