A public essay on the social urge to pull others down

I grew up in Phoenix with the kind of heat that teaches children what “escape” means. In the summer the air did not feel like weather so much as a rule, a constraint you could not negotiate with language. If you stayed out too long, your body reminded you who was in charge. My family learned what people learn when a place becomes difficult to inhabit for part of the year. We learned the exits. We learned the roads north. When we could, we would leave the valley and climb into the pines, up to Woods Canyon Lake, where the air cooled and your nervous system stopped arguing with the environment.

I loved that place, and I also feared it. I had a deathly fear of crawdads. If you have never seen them in freshwater, you might picture something cartoonish, a harmless little creature that exists only to be pointed at. In my memory they were not cute. They were small armored facts. They were the moment the water ceased to be water and became habitat, with its own indifference. I did not fear many things as a kid, but I feared those.

Years later, as a young adult, my friends learned this about me and did what friends do when they discover a fear that is both specific and funny. They teased me for my fear of crustaceans. I deserved it. It was absurd. It is still absurd. So it has not escaped my attention that I have now reached the part of my life where I want to write seriously about a proverb involving crustaceans. I did not choose this metaphor. It found me.

“Crabs in a bucket” is a phrase people use when they want to describe a particular kind of social sabotage. The story usually told is this: put crabs in a bucket and you don’t need a lid. When one crab tries to climb out, another grabs it. The group becomes its own containment. People repeat this story as if it were a law of crustacean behavior, but that is not why the proverb survives. It survives because it points at a human pattern that people recognize instantly even when they have never named it.

You can see the pattern in ordinary life. Someone starts to improve their situation and is met with a response that closes more than it opens. Someone tries to step out of a long family dynamic and suddenly becomes the problem. Someone begins to stand out at work and finds their successes treated as awkward, suspicious, or socially inconvenient. Someone chooses sobriety, or therapy, or education, or a different city, and the response is not celebration but a pressure to return to the previous baseline. The phrase gets said with bitterness, with relief, with resignation, sometimes even as a warning. If you try to climb out, do not be surprised when the claws appear.

It is tempting to explain this as jealousy and call it a day. Jealousy names the feeling, not the work. A proverb lasts when it can offer a diagnosis people keep encountering, and if this one is right about anything, it is right about this: pulling someone down is rarely random. It is doing something for the system that produces it.

The proverb also lands differently depending on who hears it, because people have used it for different purposes. In some communities the phrase “crab mentality” functions as an internal critique, a way to name lateral policing under scarcity and humiliation, where deviation feels dangerous because it threatens fragile agreements that make survival possible. In other contexts the phrase is used as a moral verdict, a way to treat constraint as a cultural flaw and move on, as if the primary obstacle were not institutional design, economic constraint, and the costs people inherit. In workplaces the proverb often gets treated as a personality story, a neat explanation for why success attracts sabotage, and in that form it becomes a comforting simplification. Some people cannot stand to see you succeed. That can be true, but it is usually not the full truth.

The fuller truth is that a bucket is not only a container. It is a boundary. Inside any human group there is a shared interpretive environment, a way of deciding what is normal, what is possible, what is respectable, and what kinds of feeling can be spoken without consequence. When a group is functioning well, people can change and the system can update. Under strain, a group stops reading deviation as information and starts reading it as threat.

Upward movement is not only a personal event, it is a claim. It says the environment is not fate. It says what we called normal may have been a ceiling. It says some suffering may have been optional, or at least not distributed the way we pretended it was. For the person climbing, this can feel like relief, competence, or recovery. For the people still inside the bucket, it often arrives first as destabilizing information. It forces questions the group may not be equipped to answer. If you can leave, why did I stay. If you can heal, what does my stagnation mean. If you can be treated with dignity, what does that imply about the indignities we accepted.

Humans are comparative by design. We calibrate ourselves against the people closest to us. That is why the pull-down impulse is so often directed laterally rather than upward at distant celebrities. It tends to appear among siblings, friends, neighbors, coworkers, classmates, people close enough that the comparison is not abstract. When someone near you improves in a domain you secretly measure yourself by, you do not simply witness their improvement. You feel what their improvement implies about your own position, even if you do not want to.

There is also a deeper mechanism that makes the proverb feel eerily accurate. Many groups bond around shared struggle. They form closeness through a shared account of difficulty, or through agreement about what is possible and what is not. In that kind of environment, one person’s escape changes the social contract. Relief becomes asymmetry. Asymmetry produces pressure the group tries to relieve. If we have been a “we” because we were surviving the same conditions, your departure does not only create distance, it threatens the basis of the bond. The group can respond by learning to tolerate difference, by developing a bond that can survive asymmetry, or it can respond by trying to erase the asymmetry. Pulling down is an attempt to erase it.

Simone Weil wrote about a human tendency that sounds brutal when said plainly: the wish to pull others down, to make them feel what we are feeling. It is easy to hear that and interpret it as a simple moral failure. Weil’s point is that it is also a structural response to suffering. Some suffering does not only hurt, it isolates. When you are in pain and the room continues as if your pain is not there, a second pain arrives, a pain of non-reception, a sense of being left alone with a reality that does not register. In that condition the impulse to spread suffering is not always hatred. Often it is a craving for symmetry. If you feel what I feel, then my experience becomes undeniable. If you remain untouched, my experience can begin to feel unreal, like I am carrying something privately that no one else will consent to call real.

The proverb is a folk diagram of that impulse. It is not always articulated as “I want you to suffer.” It appears in smaller forms that aim for the same symmetry. I want you to be embarrassed with me. I want you to fail with me. I want you to remain constrained so my constraint stays legible. I want you to stay close enough that my reality does not become a private room I cannot leave.

One of the most common forms of pulling down is not direct sabotage. It is interpretive sabotage. When a person starts to climb, the group either treats it as information or treats it as betrayal. That reinterpretation has a recognizable vocabulary. You think you are better than us now. You have changed. Must be nice. You got lucky. You forgot where you came from. These are not random insults, they do a specific job. They transform upward movement into moral failure. If growth can be framed as arrogance, then no one has to confront what growth implies. If leaving can be framed as betrayal, then staying becomes loyalty. If success can be framed as vanity, then struggle becomes virtue.

This is not always conscious. Often it happens as a reflex. Someone tells you good news and your body flinches. You smile, but part of you wants to puncture the joy before it creates distance. You want to add a qualifier, a joke, a warning, something that reasserts the shared baseline. That puncture is the crab impulse in its ordinary form.

Underneath the proverb is grief. When someone climbs out, the group is forced to confront questions it has been avoiding. If escape is possible, then the bucket was never a law. It was a boundary everyone agreed not to test, or a boundary no one believed could be tested without paying a cost. For the person who stayed, there may be a hundred good reasons: responsibility, lack of resources, illness, caregiving, fear, safety, timing, sheer exhaustion. Most people stay for reasons that are not simple failures. They stay because leaving is expensive. So when someone else leaves, what rises is not only envy, it is the pain of seeing the cost in clear light. Your escape illuminates my constraint. It makes my compromises visible. It makes my reasons legible. If I am not ready to hold those, and myself, with compassion, I may reach for the relief that is most available. I will pull you back down until the difference disappears.

This is where the proverb turns inward. Many of us have participated in the pull-down, through a comment that destabilized confidence, a joke that narrowed the joy, or a tone that signaled the limits of acceptable difference. If you have never felt that impulse, you may have been spared the conditions that produce it, or you may not have met it in yourself yet. Humans are built for belonging, and belonging often runs on symmetry. When a group has not learned how to tolerate difference, the first response to difference is not curiosity, it is correction. Pulling down is correction. It says return to the shared baseline.

If the proverb were only about jealousy, the solution would be simple and sentimental. Stop being jealous. That is not a real solution. The pull-down impulse is not only an emotion, it is a regulation move inside an interpretive environment that cannot tolerate asymmetry. So what changes the pattern is not motivational speech, it is a different kind of stability.

A group can tolerate one person climbing out when success does not imply abandonment, when difference does not imply contempt, when relief does not imply moral failure, and when belonging is not dependent on shared suffering. In those conditions the ethical alternative becomes possible. Instead of forcing symmetry through pulling down, people can practice witness. Witness is the capacity to let someone else’s reality be real without needing to collapse it into your own. It is the ability to say, with sincerity, I am glad you got out. I am proud of you. I miss you. I am still here. My suffering does not need to become your suffering in order to count as real.

That last sentence is the hinge, and it is where the proverb quietly points. The crab impulse is, at bottom, a protest against unreality. It says do not leave me alone in this. Witness answers I will not, not by dragging you back, but by telling the truth about where we are and staying in relationship across the distance. That is harder than sabotage. It requires maturity. It requires humility. It requires a willingness to let your own pain remain yours without converting it into a weapon.

It also requires something structural. Many people cannot witness because they are at capacity. Many communities cannot witness because their margins are narrow. Many families cannot witness because too much depends on maintaining a particular account of how things are. These limits are not distributed evenly. Some people are asked to tolerate uncertainty, asymmetry, and risk with far fewer resources and far higher consequences. When upward movement is rare or precarious, the pressure to keep everyone in place intensifies. What looks like hostility often begins as fear of losing access, safety, or belonging in systems that already ration all three.

If you want fewer buckets, you need fewer environments where suffering is the main adhesive. You need conditions where change does not threaten viability, where difference does not read as abandonment, and where one person’s progress does not imply another person’s disappearance. You need more paths forward that do not require social exile, and more dignity in ascent—especially for those who have been expected, historically and repeatedly, to maintain stability for others.

When I think about Woods Canyon Lake, I still think about relief, and I also think about how quickly a beautiful place can become uncanny when you notice what lives under the surface. The proverb works because it has that same quality. It looks like a simple folk phrase. Then you notice what it is actually describing: the way groups preserve stability by punishing escape, and the way suffering recruits others when it cannot be carried alone.

It is funny to me that my childhood fear of crawdads became a running joke and that the joke has now turned into a doorway into a serious piece of social analysis. It is also fitting. A proverb is a small creature in the water. Most people glance at it and move on. If you stop long enough to look, you realize it is armored and old. It has survived because it fits the environment it describes.

Once you see what the proverb names, it becomes difficult to unsee. What matters then is how it is used. It can be wielded as an insult, a way to dismiss people you do not want to understand. Or it can be taken as a diagnosis, a way of naming the conditions that give rise to the pull-down impulse and the conditions under which it loosens its grip. Read this way, the question changes. It is no longer simply why people behave like this. It is: what kind of bucket makes this feel like the only move, and what would it take to make upward movement non-punitive?

Suggested citation

Vallejo, J. (2026). Crabs in a Bucket: A public essay on the social urge to pull others down.

References / Further Reading

• Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (on affliction, and the impulse to spread suffering).

• Tall poppy syndrome (a closely related proverb-family about punishing standout success).

• Social comparison theory (on how proximity intensifies evaluation and threat).