The Best Revenge Is Living Well
Vivere bene est optima vindicta.
I’ve heard the phrase “the best revenge is living well” my whole life. It always struck me as a nice sentiment without teeth behind it. Live well and somehow the person who wronged you suffers?
That never fully made sense to me until I started thinking about what ‘living well’ required to work as revenge in the first place: an audience.
Where the Phrase Comes From
You’ll primarily see it credited to George Herbert, the 17th century Welsh poet, whose 1651 collection of proverbs Jacula Prudentum contains a version of it. Other historians trace it further back to Roman moralists and Stoic-adjacent thinking, the same intellectual neighborhood as Seneca and his writings on anger/grudges.
Its exact origin is murky, which is fitting for a phrase that’s now essentially folklore.
What’s consistent across every version of it is the implication of being seen. Living well as revenge only functions if the person you’re getting revenge on can observe the living. For most of human history, that observation happened slowly. A wedding a few towns over, a promotion mentioned secondhand at church. This information moved at the speed of gossip, which is to say, not very fast.
Do you remember as a child playing that telephone game to teach you about spreading information? Usually by the second or third person, the message would be entirely different.
The Problem: “Living Well”
Social media turned “living well” from something you quietly did into something you constantly performed. The vacation isn’t real until it’s posted. The revenge isn’t revenge unless someone specific saw the story and, ideally, screenshotted it and sent it to someone else.
The issue is that this flips the entire premise of the old proverb on its head. The original idea wasn’t “make sure they see how good you’re doing.” It was closer to “don’t waste your energy on them at all, just go live your life, and if it gets back to them, so be it.”
‘Oversharing culture’ has trained an entire generation to believe that a life not documented is a life not lived. I’d argue the opposite. If you have to prove you’re doing well on some level you’re still existing for the person you’re trying to prove it to. This kind of rumination is not worth it. That’s still giving them rent-free space in your head, just with better lighting and a filter.
Doubt Is the Actual Weapon
Here’s the part I think gets missed. In a world where everyone is oversharing absence isn’t neutral.
If someone who used to post disappears, the people who wronged them are left with nothing. No proof of misery. No proof of triumph. Give them silence, because silence is a lot harder to interpret than a reel.
Someone posting about their life gives an ex, a former friend, an old boss, a clean narrative to file away.
In fact, the Zeigarnik effect is a psychological idea that an individual remembers unfinished or uninterrupted tasks better than completed tasks.
What This Actually Looks Like
If you stop needing an audience to validate that your life is going well then the people who once had a front row seat simply lose their seat. You stopped selling them tickets.
I’ve written before about why I choose to subscribe instead of follow and this is the other half of the same coin. Cutting the feeds out protects your own headspace. It quietly removes you from being a data point in someone else’s story. No one can screenshot a life you didn’t publish.
Conclusion
The way I read the old proverb, it was not about winning. It was about disengaging completely so that winning and losing stop being the frame. The version of that idea suited for right now isn’t a well-lit photo captioned with a subtweet.
Close the app, go and do something worth doing for its own sake. Doubt is patient.
Questions or corrections? Please email me at nickstambaugh@proton.me
Photo by Vasilis Caravitis on Unsplash
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