“Hey Dave! Nice truck, is that the new F150 Lightning?! When did you get that?”
“Hey Doug! Thanks, just got it! It’s so awesome, check it out, 0-60 in 5 seconds, and it tows 15,000 lbs.”
Fast forward to 6:00 pm that night while making dinner with Meghan, Doug’s wife … “Dave got an F150 Lightning… it’s really nice, I think that car is over $100,000… they must be doing well… I had no idea…”
“Good for them…” Meghan says. “Good for them…” Doug agrees. Pause for 10 seconds. “Ya know, I think that car would be pretty perfect for us to have.”
At 11:00 pm Doug goes online, and Google’s ‘Ford Lightning reviews.’ Then he does similar searches on Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok.
“Top F150 Lightning best buy trim package”, “Why the F150 Lightning is the Ford you never knew you needed”, “Save the planet with Lightning”, “I made a profit after driving my F150 lightning a year, then flipping it!” … Doug spends the next 3 hours reading the above headlines, and supporting videos that auto play on loop.
The next morning, Doug wakes up Meghan. “I think we need this truck. It’s an amazing value, we can re-sell it and make money, it’s also amazing for the environment, it tows an RV, and can accelerate like no other truck. I already checked and they are running a special on interest rates. We’ll drive it for a long time, so I think we can make this work! “
We all know the famous saying, ‘Keeping up with the Joneses.’ I was a victim to this even at the ripe age of 7. Our next-door neighbor lived in a modest house, but had a bright white 1971 Porsche 911 Targa that looked like it had never been driven, and was constantly washing it. On second thought, I never saw him drive it! I instantly viewed him as the successful next-door neighbor that I wanted to emulate. It wasn’t until 20 years later that I became aware that he lived paycheck to paycheck and that Porsche was truly his only love.
Keeping up with the Joneses, or the need to buy items that your neighbors buy to maintain a sense of the same social class status, has been an issue for people at least since the phrase was first used in Arthur R. “Pop” Momand’s 1913 comic strip “Keeping Up with the Joneses.”
As difficult as it was to keep up with the Joneses, it only became more challenging with the birth of social media. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and most recently TikTok, became the land of the perfect self, where limitless edits appearance, what is said, how it is said…. And no one can fact check it! (And even if they did fact check, half the people wouldn’t believe it!) Social media’s ability to showcase unauthentic perfection has magnified Keeping up with the Joneses to a level far unsustainable than what it had been historically.
Reading finance statistics, I’m under the impression that I am doing well for myself financially, top 10% salary. But then I spent a couple hours searching #salary and #careergoals on Instagram, and by the end, I was completely convinced I failed at work, life, and that I was never going to retire.
Every person I see is throwing stacks of cash in the air, buying rare Pokémon cards for $10k plus, showcasing their bitcoin portfolios, drop shipping $300,000 of pet toys last month, it literally never ends because I continue to Doom scroll (the tendency to continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing). Influencers are promising to teach people the basics of savings and investing, but they are charging over $1000 for their course, and claiming to make $100,000 a month. I repeat $100,000 a month making an online course about personal finance!
But yet, the stats I still read say that the average household salary in America is $87,864, and the median U.S. household income is $61,937. That’s $7,322 a month average compared to the millions I constantly see touted online. It has become clear to me that Keeping up with the Joneses of the internet is a unsustainable task. There are far too many people inflating far too much wealth, that does not reflect the statistics of the economy. And while I am still prone to enter the scroll of doom from time to time, I have created my own antibiotic to the virus that has become social self-inflation.
I now spend more of my time highlighting my Anti-Joneses characteristics. When I find a good deal on a product, I talk about it. I live for the $12,000 used car that I purchased and then added Apple CarPlay to. I get off on purchasing a property that isn’t IN the big city, but right outside, easily accessible to, and 1/3rd the price. The more I do it, the more confident I become in my thrill for a deal. And then when I do go online and search, I start to notice that there are plenty of anti-Joneses like me! Folks that are prouder to find a good value than anything, prouder to cook at home and save their pennies, more excited to drive old used cars because they aren’t phased by the cultural pressures of new fancy cars. And the combined power of these anti-Joneses creates powerful cult-like followings for value products that never would have gained traction before…. The old Toyota SUVs, a real leather couch from Facebook Marketplace, my parents GE washer and dryer from 1975 that will never stop working. The anti-Joneses revolution is making it cool to not keep up with the Joneses, but to be confident in saving money and buying unique used goods that your neighbors may not have and being loud about it!… or being proud of not buying anything at all… because at our core, we don’t want to be defined by what we own, but by who we are and how we make others feel.
And that’s why, the Joneses just aren’t my type of people.
Ricky – The Steady Investor