Luigui Bleand: Not Even a Fly

MILAN, ITALY — There is a phrase from home for a certain kind of loneliness: ni una mosca se te pega – not even a fly sticks to you. I learnt what it means in hard times, when I went everywhere on foot, struggling, hustling for every small step. In days like those, nobody sticks with you. Nobody talks to you, nobody asks how you are. What I remember most is the quiet around me. I do not write this as a complaint. It is simply how it was, and with time I understood that it was only one half of something larger.

“Not even a fly” is how it feels. The research on hardship is more precise, and in a way kinder. In a 2016 study in Social Indicators Research, the social scientists Carina Mood and Jan O. Jonsson used Sweden’s Level-of-Living Survey to follow 3,089 people interviewed in 2000 and again in 2010. Falling into poverty tended to weaken social life, and it hurt how often people met friends and relatives more than it hurt having a close friend to count on. When people climbed out, the losses appeared to reverse. The authors call their conclusions tentative and their estimates imprecise. Even so, one line of theirs stays with me: “our nearest and dearest tend to hang on to us”. The circle thins at the edges; the centre tends to hold.

There may be another reason the struggling go unnoticed, and it has less to do with loyalty than with attention. In 2010, in American Psychologist, Susan Fiske drew together experiments from her laboratory in an address titled “Envy up, scorn down”. Comparison, she argues, runs both ways: envy toward those above us, scorn toward those below. In brain imaging, photographs of the lowest-ranked groups, such as homeless people, did not significantly activate a region involved in thinking about other people’s minds, whereas photographs of the other groups did. Those studies concerned stereotyped groups, mostly in the United States, not one person on a hard road, so I take them only as an echo. But the direction is familiar: when you are down, it is easy to go unseen.

The other half arrives later. I like to say, half joking, that the moment you achieve something, the moment you move forward in life, you will see 500 enemies and 6 haters appear. I have never counted; the numbers are only my way of laughing at it. The idea underneath is serious, though. Until you do something that matters, nobody bothers with you, nobody even wants to mess with you. It takes you doing something. Fiske describes the same turn from the other side. Envy, she writes, is aimed upward – at the rich, at professionals and entrepreneurs, but also at peers and allies who are doing better than oneself. To move forward is to become someone others measure themselves against.

Something like this can be measured in public life. In 2025, in EPJ Data Science, Liam Burke-Moore, Angus R. Williams and Jonathan Bright analysed 45.5 million messages sent on Twitter to 4,602 public figures in the United Kingdom: members of parliament, footballers and journalists. In all three fields, a more prominent online presence went with more abuse, and most of the abuse fell on a small number of people – although, they note, the most abused were rarely the most followed. There were no musicians in the study, and a correlation is not a law. Even so, it fits what I mean: hostility tends to gather where attention gathers. Before you are seen, there is nothing to aim at.

What arrives with that attention is not one thing. In 2009, in the journal Emotion, Niels van de Ven, Marcel Zeelenberg and Rik Pieters separated two experiences of envy that often share one name. They began in the Netherlands, where Dutch has a separate word for each, and people recalling each kind described different things. In American and Spanish samples, whose languages have only one word, a statistical analysis still found the same two experiences. Benign envy comes with a wish to move up, to improve one’s own position. Malicious envy comes with what the authors call a pulling-down motivation, aimed at damaging the position of the person who is ahead. The same success can make one onlooker want to climb and another want to pull the climber down.

What decides which one appears? In 2012, in Motivation and Emotion, the same three researchers asked 124 participants, with an average age of 20, to imagine that a coworker had received a raise and they had not. When the raise was undeserved, the malicious kind was higher: people said they would secretly wish the coworker would lose clients, and would gossip about them. When it was deserved, the benign kind was higher: they said they would feel inspired and start to work harder, most of all when the next chance of a raise was near. It was an imagined workplace, not observed behaviour. It makes me think that whether a success looks deserved depends on what people can see. Onlookers see the arrival. They rarely see the days on foot.

So what is the calm answer? Not to hide the work, or the road. In 2019, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Alison Wood Brooks and colleagues reported that people are generally reluctant to reveal their failures. Yet in their online experiments, revealing the failures met on the way to success, and not only the successes, reduced observers’ malicious envy on average. At a pitch competition for entrepreneurs, where the authors call the evidence only suggestive, it pointed the same way: less malicious envy, more benign envy. It will not make hostility disappear. There is an old video of me on foot in those hard days, from when I lived in Los Girasoles, in Santo Domingo. I would rather people see that walk than only where it led.

Good news sorts people too. In 2004, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Shelly Gable and colleagues looked at what happens when people share good news, across four studies of students and couples. Only enthusiastic, engaged responses went with better relationships; even quiet, low-key approval was linked to poorer outcomes. The studies were correlational, and they were about people who were already close, not strangers. Still, they sharpen something I already felt: the people who stay when there is nothing to gain, and who celebrate out loud when something is finally gained, are worth more than the crowd that appears later.

I have made a kind of peace with both seasons. The silence while I was walking did not mean the work was worth nothing, and the crowd that appears when I move forward does not mean it is worth more. I still listen to fair criticism, because it can make a song better. The rest I let pass, the way strangers pass you in a crowded passage. I do not need to name anyone; it is not my place to judge what is in another person’s heart. The road is the same one I walked when not even a fly came near. I walked it then, and I am still walking it, grateful to whoever walks beside me for the right reasons.