Living Vicariously: What It Means, the Good and the Bad

Living vicariously means enjoying an experience through someone else instead of living it yourself, like following a friend’s trip photo by photo or feeling a team’s win as if you had scored the goal yourself. A little of it is ordinary, even kind, and everybody does it whenever a good story pulls us in. However, when watching other people’s lives gradually takes the place of building our own, the habit turns unhealthy.

This piece is part of our self-help section, and it sits close to our guide on why living for yourself is not selfish. Here we look at the phrase itself, why our minds enjoy it so much, and how to recognize the moment it has gone too far.

What Does Living Vicariously Mean?

To live vicariously is to borrow someone else’s experience and feel it as if it were partly ours. Merriam-Webster defines vicarious as “experienced or realized through imaginative or sympathetic participation in the experience of another”, and its everyday example is “a vicarious thrill”. So the thrill is real, but the mountain, the stage or the plane ticket belongs to someone else.

The word itself is older than most of us would guess. Merriam-Webster traces it to the Latin vicarius and dates its first known use in English to 1637, when it meant “serving instead of someone or something else”. Wiktionary even lists it as a cousin of the word ‘vicar’, both grown from that same Latin root.

That is the heart of it: when we live vicariously, someone else stands in for us, and we ride along in our imagination.

○ “I’m Living Vicariously Through You”

Is it correct to say “I’m living vicariously through you”? Yes, it is perfectly good English, and it is usually a compliment.

It simply means “your life is exciting right now, I cannot do this myself, and I am enjoying it through you”, and friends say it about vacations, promotions, weddings and wild stories all the time. Here is how the phrase is used in a sentence.

• “You’re in Bali and I’m stuck at my desk, so I’m living vicariously through your stories.”
• “Since my knee surgery, I live vicariously through my brother’s soccer games.”
• “Some parents live vicariously through their children’s grades.” (the less kind use)

Other ways to say it are “I’m enjoying this through you”, “I’m living through you”, “I’m getting a secondhand thrill” or, more formally, “experiencing it by proxy”. The opposite is living something firsthand, being the person on the trip rather than the one reading about it.

Why We Enjoy Living Through Others

Why do we find so much pleasure in other people’s lives? Well, each of us has one body, one wallet and only so many hours in a day, whilst the list of experiences we would love to try never ends.

Living through others is how we squeeze a few extra lives into the one we have.

There is real neuroscience behind the feeling too. In a 2009 study in Science, volunteers watched a stranger who seemed like them win cash, and the AAAS reported that their brain’s reward area lit up much as it did when they won for themselves. In the study’s own words, vicarious reward “increases with perceived similarity”.

That explains why we feel a friend’s promotion far more than a stranger’s, and why we cheer loudest for the player who grew up in our town.

Sports fans show it best of all. In three field studies, the first run at seven American universities, psychologist Robert Cialdini and his team found that students wore more clothing with their university’s name after a football win, and said “we” more when they described a victory. As Cialdini’s paper points out, the chant is always “We’re number one,” never “They’re number one”. He called it ‘basking in reflected glory’, and honestly, we all do it!

○ Empathy Starts Here

Living vicariously is a close cousin of empathy. To feel what another person is going through, we have to step into their shoes for a moment, the same thing we do when we tear up at a friend’s good news. People who do this well usually understand other people’s emotions and know how to show up when it matters.

So the habit is not a character flaw to be ripped out. A little of it makes us kinder.

○ Lives We Will Never Get to Live

Books, films, games and travel vlogs are living vicariously by design. For a couple of hours we become a detective, an astronaut or a farmer in Tuscany, and then we close the book and come back to our own kitchen, a little richer for the adventure.

Nobody needs to feel guilty about that, because storytelling is one of the oldest ways we humans have of trying on lives we will never live.

Stories can also show us what we really want. One Reddit user wrote that they once obsessed over a science fiction novel with a character who grew algae to power a spaceship, and they are now a PhD student studying algae.

That is living vicariously done right: the story lit the match, and the life became their own.

When Living Vicariously Goes Too Far

The trouble starts quietly, almost invisibly. We stop being inspired by someone else’s life and start using it as a substitute for our own, which is exactly what the old meaning of the word was, ‘serving instead of’.

The signs are easy to spot once we are honest with ourselves. We know more about a creator’s week than about our own plans, and our mood rises and falls with people who do not know we exist.

We say “I wish I could do that” without ever asking “Why can’t I?”

Many of us also feel strangely hollow when the show, the season or the relationship ends, as if the life we were watching was the only one we had.

○ The Spectator’s Illusion

Here is a hidden cost that is easy to miss. Researchers at Chicago Booth ran six experiments in which people watched videos of skills such as throwing darts, doing the moonwalk or juggling, some of them up to 20 times.

In the Chicago Booth tests, the more people watched, the more confident they felt about doing it themselves, yet their actual skill did not improve, and people who simply held the juggling pins afterwards realized they had learned far less than they thought.

We like to call this ‘the spectator’s illusion’. Watching someone else train for a marathon can quietly convince us we are halfway there ourselves, because the feeling of progress arrives even when the progress does not.

○ Escape That Never Ends

Sometimes we live through others because our own life feels like a maze with no way out. We may not believe in ourselves, or we may be dissatisfied with how our days look, so we slip into somebody else’s world where everything seems easier.

The escape helps for an evening; however, it does nothing about the maze.

There is another catch. When we only ride along on someone else’s wins, we skip the part where we fail, learn and try again, and that part is exactly where real confidence is built.

A life lived from the passenger seat never collects its own scars, and so it never collects its own stories either.

Four Common Ways We Live Through Others

Living vicariously looks different depending on whose life we are borrowing. These are the four situations we see most often, each with a small, practical fix.

○ Through Your Child

Parents have been accused of this for as long as there have been stage mothers and sideline fathers. A PLOS ONE study of 73 Dutch parents found that those who saw their child as part of themselves, once reminded of their own unfulfilled ambitions, wanted that child to fulfill them.

The PLOS ONE team measured what parents wished for, not what they did or how their children turned out. Still, the fix is simple.

Ask your child what they love, listen carefully to the answer, and pick up the old dream yourself, whether that is a weekend art class or a beginners’ running group.

It is never too late to be a beginner!

○ Through Social Media and Screens

Scrolling is living vicariously on fast-forward, with a whole crowd of vacations, weddings and glow-ups before breakfast.

In a University of Pennsylvania experiment with 143 students, psychologist Melissa Hunt asked a randomly chosen group to keep Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram to 10 minutes per app per day for three weeks, whilst the rest scrolled as usual. Her conclusion was that using less social media than we normally would “leads to significant decreases in both depression and loneliness”.

We do not have to quit altogether. Put a limit on the apps that leave us feeling behind, unfollow a few accounts that make us feel inadequate, and for every evening spent watching other people’s adventures, plan one small adventure of our own.

○ Through Stars and Sports Teams

Loving a singer or a team is pure fun, and nobody should take that away from us.

It becomes a problem when we celebrate, argue or even fight with the people closest to us for the sake of a celebrity who will never know our name. Their wins do not pay our rent, and their losses should not ruin our week.

A good test is to notice where the feeling goes after the match or the album drop. If it spills onto family and friends, it is time to turn the volume down a little.

○ Through a Partner or Friend

This one is the hardest to recognize from the inside.

One Reddit user, aged 24, wrote that they had spent their early twenties “living vicariously through my ex’s social circle and plans”, and felt like a shell of who they were once it ended.

When our weekends, our friends and our dreams all belong to one other person, losing that person means losing everything at once. So, even in the happiest relationship, keep at least one friendship, one hobby and one goal that are entirely yours.

How to Stop Living Vicariously

The answer is not to stop caring about other people’s lives. It is to let them inspire us rather than replace us, and that takes a few small, practical moves.

Firstly, catch yourself saying “I wish I could do that”. When was the last time you said it?

Write down the exact thing you wished for, because envy is surprisingly specific. We rarely want a friend’s whole life, only the solo trip, the confidence on stage or the small business of their own.

Next, find the smallest hands-on version you can do this week. If you watch cooking videos every night, cook one of those dishes on Sunday; if you follow climbers, book a single session at a climbing wall.

Remember the jugglers, because holding the pins showed them how much was still left to learn, something watching never did.

Then trade some watching time for doing time, once a week to start with. Turn the bigger wish into a goal with a date and a first step, and our guide on setting realistic goals can help with that part.

Lastly, keep the cheering. Celebrating a friend’s success is a lovely thing, and it sits perfectly well beside a life of our own.

If the emptiness has lasted two weeks or more, or it is getting hard to cope with, please talk to a doctor, because the NHS says low mood that lasts that long can be a sign of depression. Our guide on how to start over in life may also help with the first steps back.

Can You Live Vicariously Through Yourself?

Strictly speaking, no, since the word means living through someone else. However, people use the phrase playfully, and we rather like the idea behind it.

Our past self is a different person in many ways, the one who took that trip, passed that exam or said yes to that risk. Looking back at their photographs can remind us what we are capable of.

And our future self is someone we can live for today, by doing the thing now that they will thank us for.

So yes, in a way, we can live vicariously through ourselves. We only have to make sure there is something worth watching.

Watch a little less, live a little more, and let the best stories be your own.

FAQ About Living Vicariously