I was advising a junior colleague who obviously is gambling excessively with respect to his earnings and in self defense he pointed out to me some others who were worse than himself as a vindication of his own already bad practice.

Of a truth, the people he referred to are 5X worse than him and it was obvious they started from his level and degraded to a worse condition. I tried pointing out to him that measuring excessive gambling is a self evaluation with respect to your finances and not using others as a yardstick of measurement but he dismissed my with the words "As long as I'm not yet gambling like these guys, I'm fine".

I'm sure this mindset exists especially among friends who are into gambling and I decided to bring it up here for discussion.

Do you think it's right to reference to others as a yardstick to evaluate your level of responsible gambling?