At least for me, working out the math to put 10x the effort to reach an arbitrary standard of success feels increasingly absurd if the baseline keeps shifting and the process of getting there is more like a crooked road down the alley that a straight highway.
The whole thing seems doable thanks to having comparison in the mix. I think, for example, the standard of living benchmark is often the average person's current lifestyle, say living costs, ability to take vacations or not, and maybe also owning a home that appreciates faster than wages.
But somehow the standard gradually increases while the average person's actual financial security takes more or less the opposite direction.
Visibility trap
A potential culprit here is rising expectations fueled by visibility.
We see more of what others have than ever before and rarely see their debt statements or anxiety levels on the other side of the equation.
I sometimes tend to wonder when I read these reports of consumer spending where do the overall consumers get this money from?
Of course, credit cards and loans explain an external part of it, but there's something deeper happening.
The wondering takes on different meaning when you experience there's also an actual impression game at play, which basically is people spending to signal membership in a lifestyle tier they may not actually inhabit financially.
Put in a slightly different way, people are financing more of an audience and necessarily a life.
Memetic desire
Group shopping is contagiously dangerous. I want what you want because you want it, and you want it because someone else signaled it was desirable first. Circular validation that bypasses rational evaluation entirely isn't a sustainable model for personal fulfillment.
Trendsetters must've accumulated enormous social capital in this domain. I'm thinking why do people, myself included, grant certain individuals the authority to define what's worth wanting? What makes someone's taste credible enough that we'll reorganize our budgets around their aesthetic choices?
Part of it comes down to a confusion of sorts between two different types of value.
I'd prefer that the intrinsic value something brings to my actual life to not be overly entangled with its symbolic value in the social marketplace.
An example is getting a high-end watch for its brand recognition rather than its timekeeping accuracy, which is often surpassed by a cheap digital alternative.
Kind of similarly, a $800 jacket does provide the same warmth as a $80 one, but the former broadcasts a different message about who you are or more accurately who one is trying to be.
Getting to the exit
This game has no winning condition from my standpoint.
Like ideas, which are cheap and can be spun on a dime, perceived standards inflate quite faster than incomes. There's always another tier, another benchmark, another person whose curated life makes yours look insufficient.
Since the comparison game has enough room to expand infinitely, the only way to win is to exit the arena.
Of course, one may have to get deep in the arena first to have this realization, then figure out a way to find an exit, hopefully a permanent one, if that's even a possibility.
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