You made many interesting points as well, and I reply piecemeal otherwise the convo can last forever!

Well, do you think that only what is logical and reasonable endures the passage of time?

Definitely not! Religion is one obvious example you cited. But religion makes statements about things out there, therefore it can be judged as false (or true), but envy is just a feeling inside us, it's like being angry, and so it can't exactly be called false, it doesn't go against facts out there in the world in any obvious way, so it can be called irrational only hypothetically, on the assumption that a person wants something else (e.g. happiness) that contradicts his other feelings and actions (e.g. envy and whatever that might lead to).

Your example with the filthy rich psychologist vs filthy rich actress illustrates your point about competition very well, and I 100% agree with you that that's at play.

However, we still need to differentiate between two situations: in one, the filthy rich psychologist is a truly worthy one, like Freud or whatever (take your pick). In the other case, the filthy rich psychologist is someone who writes a book like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, or something like that. We don't need a real example, just imagine that someone is taking advantage of people's ignorance to sell them junk, things you might know are palpably untrue because it's your field and everyone in your field knows it, but the person in the street doesn't, and so someone sells them unscientific self-help junk or whatever. In this second case, I would say you're not feeling envious, instead your feelings about justice (and other feelings of that category) are being hurt, and you feel yourself intellectually insulted, and you feel that this person is propagating things that may make people worse off.

I should note that it's possible that the filthy rich psychologist both sucks and you're being envious of him. It's like when a person who is a psychopath finds an acceptable way to channel his psychopathy by becoming an 'interrogator' (torturer) for the CIA or whatnot! In the same way a person can find a target where he will be able to intellectually rationalize his envy. This is where it gets tricky, because psychology would need to devise some pretty interesting experiments to get at the truth of the matter of what someone feels privately inside.

I wholeheartedly agree with the following:

The lack of whistles and bells in our individuality is not an excuse for not trying to improve, and aim at great personal goals :)

However, when the general culture talks about uniqueness, it's not clear what they're trying to say exactly. Let's say I see someone post a meme, with a snowflake, and makes some poetic statement about how all humans are unique.

So what is he trying to say? Is he trying to say that all humans, even identical twins, have different DNA? Then why didn't he use a picture of ... well, DNA?!

I think everyone knows that we are all literally unique. Everything in the universe is literally unique, even identical molecules, because even those molecules hold unique positions in space and time.

My worry is that they are trying to equate everything. It's like body positivity: an obese body is just as beautiful as a body more stereotypically kind-to-the-eyes, supposedly.

So I think that talk of uniqueness goes into the same category as there 'being no right or wrong answer in a math test', 'all students are equally good and shouldn't be graded', etc.

I don't have very strong positions about all these matters, but I think when a person says that 'my father was a unique individual', he does not mean to imply 'just like every other father in the word'. That's just not how people use that word.

If I say "I went outside today and I saw a unique apple tree", you will want to know what was unique about that apple tree. You will be disappointed if I say "no other apple tree has its branches quite in that particular orientation as that one did". In that sense, every single thing I see is unique, and so I think the word becomes useless.

Most people are much more alike than they are different, and only a few throughout history really stand out. (Take Aristotle, for example, who singlehandedly invented the entire field of logic, out of nothing. Or take Thales, the first philosopher and the first scientist: with one stroke he invented everything we describe as the western intellectual and practical approach to discovering truth.) I should say the term 'unique' should be reserved for them, unless we're being very very literal, in which case we are as unique as grains of sand, since they are also literally (but not qualitatively) unique.

Anyway, it's interesting to talk about these stuff, but I know you're busy, so I try (and fail) not to make big comments! You don't have to reply at length.