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The Trap of Comparing your Finances to Others

The phrase ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ originated in England in 1879 and then was popularized by a comic strip that began in 1913[i] and continued until 1938[ii]. The comic depicted a family lamenting about the Joneses lavish lifestyle, while also feeling like they needed to spend their money just to keep up. We can still experience these same emotions today. It’s easy to compare ourselves to others financially, and it seems like there are so many people around us with so much more. Why is it that it seems like everyone else has money, but we don’t?

Our World has Gotten Bigger

For a long time throughout history, our world was relatively small. Our world consisted of our neighbours, our family and friends, and who we saw at work. Nowadays, with social media, our world has grown exponentially. We no longer just see what our neighbours have – we see what everyone has. In a single doomscroll, we see people on vacations, people buying luxury goods, people going to beautiful restaurants, and that makes us feel like we’re missing out. This is also repeated over and over again as we scroll every day.

Trained by the Algorithm

We feel a need to keep up with those around us because we want to fit in. We want to feel connected with others in our community, whether in person or online. However, seeing what others do online doesn’t give us the big picture of their actual life.

The algorithm for social media tends to reward the extreme. We rarely see someone post about making a payment to their student loan, and that’s by design. Algorithms push things that are new and exciting, and even our friends aren’t going to post things that are mundane. However, this recontextualizes our baseline for where we should be at our stage of life. Before social media, it would be pretty rare to see photos of people our age on a luxury vacation. That’s because most people in school don’t go on luxury vacations, since school itself is expensive. However, now we can go on Instagram or TikTok and see 10, 20, 50 people our age going on vacation. We now have a new baseline – it’s easy to think that people our age spend money on expensive vacations. And now we feel like we need to do that to keep up.

Accessibility of Borrowing Money

One thing that influencers don’t tell you is how they’re buying the things that they’re showing off. Nowadays, there are a variety of ways to borrow money. Credit cards and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) are two popular ways that people borrow money to spend on these items and experiences. This year, over 60% of Coachella tickets were bought using a BNPL service[iii]. But all you see are people who go and enjoy Coachella; you don’t see that they’re still paying for it 4 months later. The accessibility to credit skews our expectations and doesn’t show us the full picture of their finances.

Things to Consider

Here are some things to consider when you feel that you’re comparing yourself to others:

Sources

[i] Safire, William. 1998. “On Language; Up the Down Ladder.” The New York Times. The New York Times Magazine. November 15, 1998. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/15/magazine/on-language-up-the-down-ladder.html?src=pm.
[ii] Holtz, Allan. 2012. American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide. University of Michigan Press.[iii] Kelly, Jack. 2025. “The Buy Now, Pay Later Boom At Coachella, Signs Of Stretched Wallets.” Forbes. Forbes. April 16, 2025. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2025/04/16/the-buy-now-pay-later-boom-at-coachella-signs-of-stretched-wallets/.

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