You’re Competing Against Someone Who Doesn’t Exist

Judging by Instagram, everyone is wealthy, well-traveled, happily married, and raising exceptionally photogenic children.

Apparently, nobody has a mortgage, a bad haircut, or a teenager.

Of course, nobody’s life looks like that all the time. We’re seeing carefully selected moments, not the ordinary days in between.

Remember the bell curve from statistics class? Most observations fall somewhere near the middle. Only a tiny percentage occupy the extremes, or what statisticians call the tails.

Those tiny areas I’ve circled represent rare outcomes. They get a disproportionate share of our attention, much like the highlights people choose to share.

We hear about the people who built billion-dollar businesses, not nearly as much about those whose businesses failed.

Social media mixes extraordinary achievements with ordinary lives at their most photogenic. Either way, we see the highlights.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

We don’t compare ourselves with just one person. We compare our house with one person’s, our vacations with another’s, our career with someone else’s, and our investments with yet another’s.

We take the most exceptional parts of different people’s lives and assemble them into a single imaginary person.

Someone who has it all.

Someone who doesn’t actually exist.

We’ve invented someone impossible to beat, then made it our goal to beat them.

And sometimes we make expensive decisions trying to catch up. A bigger house. A nicer car. A vacation we wouldn’t otherwise have considered.

So What?

There’s nothing wrong with wanting more. But before your next big financial decision, try a simple test: would you still want it if no one else ever saw it, posted about it, or asked about it?

If the answer is yes, wonderful. Spend the money and enjoy it. If the answer is “well, not really,” you may have just saved yourself a lot of money.

Maybe the better question isn’t whether you’re keeping up. It’s whether you’re pursuing a life you actually want.

For educational purposes only; not individualized investment, tax, or legal advice.