How I Finally Stopped Comparing My Finances to Everyone Else
My coworker James bought a house at 26.
I know because he would not stop talking about it. And I sat across from him every day at work for three weeks listening to him talk about his down payment and his mortgage rate and his kitchen renovation plans while I was quietly panicking because I had $340 in my checking account and two credit cards that were both over 70% utilized.
I smiled and said "that's amazing man congratulations" approximately eleven times.
And then I drove home to my apartment — the one I shared with a roommate because I couldn't afford to live alone — and I sat in my car in the parking lot for probably fifteen minutes just. sitting there. Not crying. Not angry. Just this hollow feeling. Like I had done something wrong with my life but I couldn't figure out what.
That was the feeling that defined most of my mid-twenties honestly. That hollow parking lot feeling. And it had almost nothing to do with my actual financial situation and almost everything to do with whose situation I kept comparing mine to.
The Thing That Was Actually Making Me Feel Broke
Here is what I know now that I did not know then. I was not broke because my income was too low or my expenses were too high or my habits were uniquely terrible. I mean those things were also true. But the reason I FELT so catastrophically behind was that I was constantly measuring my financial life against snapshots of other people's lives that had nothing to do with my reality.
James and his house. He made more than me. He had been saving since he was 22. His parents had helped with the down payment (I found this out later and let me tell you that information would have saved me three weeks of hollow parking lot feelings). None of this was visible from where I was sitting. All I saw was the house. The achievement. The thing I did not have.
I read somewhere that the average American believes they need to earn about 20% more than they currently make to feel financially comfortable. And the wild thing is that when people DO get that 20% increase they just move the goalposts. Now they need 20% more than that. The comfort point keeps moving. It never arrives.
That statistic stayed with me for a long time because it explained so much about how I had been living. I was always chasing a version of "enough" that kept relocating the moment I got close to it. And most of the time the thing doing the relocating was not my actual needs. It was what I was seeing other people have.
Social Media Was Doing Something I Did Not Notice For Years
Okay so I want to be specific about this because I think people hear "social media makes you feel bad about money" and they sort of nod and move on without actually understanding the mechanism. Because I did that for years. I nodded. I moved on. And then I went back to Instagram and watched someone I went to college with post a video of their new car and felt that hollow feeling again.
The mechanism is this. Social media shows you an extremely curated version of people's financial lives. You see the new car. You do not see the $650 monthly payment and the 7-year loan and the fact that they had to skip their credit card payment twice in the past three months to make it work. You see the vacation photos. You do not see the credit card it went on or the anxiety they felt when they got home and had to face the bill. You see the apartment upgrade. You do not see that they moved in with their partner partly because neither of them could afford to live alone anymore.
I am not saying people are liars. I am saying what gets posted is not the whole story. It is literally never the whole story. And your brain — my brain — does not automatically account for that. Your brain compares your complete messy behind-the-scenes reality to their carefully selected highlight reel and concludes that you are falling behind. Even when you are not.
I did an experiment once. I picked five people from my social media feeds who made me feel the most financially inadequate. Five people whose posts most consistently activated that hollow parking lot feeling. And I just. thought about what I actually knew about their financial lives versus what their posts suggested.
One of them had $22,000 in student loan debt I knew about because we had talked about it once. One of them was living off money his parents transferred monthly (he had mentioned it once in a vulnerable moment and then never brought it up again). One of them had told me a year earlier that she was thinking about bankruptcy because of her credit card situation — the same person whose European vacation photos had made me feel like I was doing everything wrong.
None of this was in the posts. None of it. The posts were just the car and the vacation and the apartment and the restaurant and the new thing. The debt and the stress and the parents and the near-bankruptcy were invisible.
The Night I Actually Noticed What I Was Doing
It was a Thursday in November. I remember because it was cold and I was eating cereal for dinner because I was trying to stretch my groceries to last the week and I was scrolling through my phone with one hand while eating with the other.
Someone I followed had posted a picture of a birthday dinner. Big group. Nice restaurant. One of those places where the entrees are $40 minimum and the photos always look perfect. And I felt it. That familiar thing. That sense of.. I don't know. Not jealousy exactly. More like grief. Like I was missing something I was supposed to have.
And then I stopped.
Because I looked around my apartment. And I had food. I had heat. I had a roof. I had a phone clearly working fine since I was using it. I had a job that was paying me enough to cover my bills even if not much more than that. I had friends. I had my health.
And I had just felt grief. Looking at a birthday dinner photo. While sitting in a warm apartment eating food.
That was the moment I understood something. The grief was not coming from my actual life. My actual life was fine. The grief was coming from the comparison. From the gap between where I was and where that Instagram photo suggested I should be. And that photo had nothing to do with my real life. Not one single thing.
I put my phone down. Finished my cereal. Sat in silence for a while.
And then I deleted Instagram off my phone.
What Happened During 30 Days Without Instagram 
I want to be honest that the first week was uncomfortable. I picked up my phone probably forty or fifty times looking for the app that was not there anymore. Muscle memory is real. My thumb knew exactly where Instagram used to live on my home screen and it kept going there and finding nothing and my brain kept experiencing a tiny jolt of annoyance each time.
By week two the reaching stopped. Or it happened less. Maybe three or four times a day instead of constantly.
By week three something unexpected happened. I stopped thinking about what I did not have. Like. I would go through an entire day without that background hum of financial inadequacy. I would see my actual bank balance and think "okay I have $280 left for the week that is workable" instead of "I have $280 left for the week and Sarah just posted about her Paris trip."
Sarah's Paris trip was still happening. Nothing about Sarah's life had changed. But I was not seeing it anymore. And without seeing it I was not comparing. And without comparing I was not feeling behind. And without feeling behind I was not making impulsive purchases to try to close a gap that only existed in my perception anyway.
Week four I did the math. I had spent $310 less than usual that month. Not because my income changed or I followed some elaborate new budget. Just because I was not being constantly shown things I did not have by an algorithm designed to make me feel like I needed more.
$310. From deleting one app.
The Deeper Problem Nobody Talks About
Here is the thing that I eventually had to sit with. The comparison was not only happening on social media. Social media just made it more constant and more visual. But the comparison was everywhere.
My coworker's house. My cousin who bought a car. My college friend who just got engaged and whose ring I had somehow already seen three different people comment on. My neighbor who I barely know but whose new furniture I could see through the window when I passed. Comparison was happening in every direction all the time and I had never once consciously decided to let it influence my financial behavior. It just did. Automatically. Constantly.
I read about something called "reference groups." The people and communities whose standards unconsciously shape our own expectations. Basically your brain looks at the people around you and says "this is what normal looks like." And then it tries to match normal. Not what you can actually afford. Not what actually makes you happy. Normal. Whatever the people you are surrounded by are doing.
Which means if your reference group spends a lot of money you will automatically feel pressure to spend a lot of money even if doing so keeps you broke. Not because you are weak. Because you are human. Because this is literally how social comparison works in the human brain. It has been working this way for our entire evolutionary history. We needed to match the tribe to survive. The tribe used to mean fifteen people living in close proximity. Now the tribe means everyone you follow on Instagram plus everyone you work with plus everyone in your neighborhood plus every TV show and movie you consume.
The inputs exploded. The comparison mechanism stayed the same.
What I Changed and What Actually Happened
I want to give you specific things because I know "stop comparing yourself" is advice that sounds good and does basically nothing.
The first thing I did was what I already described. Deleted Instagram. Not deactivated. Deleted. And I replaced the time I used to spend on it with things that had nothing to do with other people's lifestyles. Podcasts about topics I actually cared about. Reading. Walking. Cooking things I had been meaning to try. The empty time filled itself with things that did not make me feel financially inadequate.
The second thing was harder. I made a list of the five people in my physical life whose financial situations made me feel the worst about my own. Not to resent them. Just to notice who they were. And then I made myself write down what I actually KNEW about their finances versus what I had assumed from external evidence.
The gap was enormous every single time. The person I thought was thriving financially was almost always more complicated than the version I had built in my head. This was not about taking pleasure in other people's difficulties. It was about understanding that I had been comparing myself to a fiction. A story I had constructed with incomplete information.
The third thing was this. I made a new comparison. Instead of comparing myself to people around me I started comparing myself to past me. Where was I financially six months ago versus today? A year ago versus today? That comparison was actually motivating because the only direction it could go was forward or backward and I had some control over which one happened.
Three months after I started doing this my savings account had more money in it than it ever had in my adult life. Not because I suddenly earned more. Because I stopped spending money to close a gap that only existed in my imagination.
The Money I Was Spending Because of Comparison
This is the part that genuinely shocked me when I added it up.
The clothes I bought because someone at work had a nicer wardrobe than me. That was probably $80 to $120 a month honestly. Not all at once. Just a thing here and a thing there because I wanted to close some invisible style gap that probably nobody else even noticed.
The restaurant meals I said yes to that I could not really afford because I did not want to be the broke person in the group. Probably $60 to $100 a month of spending that came directly from not wanting to look like I had less than the people around me.
The apartment upgrade I almost made two years ago. I was living in a perfectly fine place paying $750 a month. I almost moved to a $950 a month place because several of my friends had nicer apartments and I felt embarrassed having people over. I did not move. But I spent probably four months feeling genuinely unhappy in a perfectly fine apartment because of a comparison I had created.
The random purchases that happened in the 20 minutes after I saw something on Instagram or TikTok that made me feel behind. These are the hardest to track but honestly probably $50 to $80 a month. Things I did not need and often did not even particularly want but that scratched some itch created by the comparison hit I had just experienced.
Add that up. $190 to $300 a month. Conservatively. On spending that came almost entirely from comparison rather than genuine desire or need. That is $2,280 to $3,600 a year.
Gone. To close gaps that did not exist except in my perception.
The Mistakes I Made Before I Figured This Out
I tried to solve the feeling by spending more. Obviously this made it worse. Every impulse purchase to close a comparison gap just left me with less money which made the comparison feel more true which made me feel worse which made me want to spend more. A perfect cycle of exactly the wrong thing.
I thought the solution was earning more. If I could just make more money I would stop feeling behind. This is wrong because the comparison mechanism does not care how much you make. It cares about the gap between what you have and what your reference group has. Earn more and if your reference group earns more too you feel exactly the same. I have seen people earning $150,000 a year feel just as financially inadequate as people earning $40,000 because of who they are comparing themselves to.
I tried to suppress the feeling instead of changing the input. I told myself to stop caring what other people had. Just stop. That works about as well as telling yourself to stop being hungry. The feeling does not respond to commands. You have to change what is creating the feeling.
Real Talk
This is still something I work on. I am not going to pretend I fixed comparison in my brain and now I live as some enlightened person who never feels inadequate. I still feel it sometimes. My old coworker James posts about his house renovations occasionally and I have a brief moment of that thing before I move on.
The difference is I move on now. The feeling visits and leaves instead of setting up camp and rearranging my spending habits around it.
And the other difference is I know what the feeling is now. I know it is comparison. I know it is a reaction to incomplete information. I know it is not telling me the truth about my financial situation. It is telling me the truth about my perception of my financial situation relative to a version of someone else's situation that is almost certainly missing most of the actual details.
Knowing that does not make the feeling disappear. But it makes me less likely to respond to it by opening Amazon at 11pm.
What to Do Before You Close This
One thing. Just one.
Think about the person in your life or on your phone whose financial situation makes you feel the most behind. The one who activates that hollow parking lot feeling the most reliably.
Now write down honestly what you actually know about their real financial situation. Not what their posts suggest. Not what their lifestyle implies. What you actually know.
I will bet you actual money that the gap between what you have assumed and what you actually know is significant. And that gap is where most of the comparison damage lives. In the space between the story you told yourself about their financial life and the reality of it.
That is the thing making you feel behind. Not your actual financial situation. The story.
Something I Genuinely Want to Know
Did you have a moment like my parking lot moment. A specific time when you realized comparison was costing you more than just good feelings. When it was actually showing up in your bank account.
I read every comment on this blog and I genuinely want to know. Not because it will make your story less hard. Just because I think there is something important about saying these things out loud to someone who has been in the same parking lot.
Tell me yours. I will tell you it sounds familiar. Because it almost certainly will.
Questions That Brought People to This Page
Why do I feel broke even when I'm not?
Almost always it is comparison. When your sense of financial wellbeing is based on how you stack up against others rather than whether your actual needs are met you will feel poor at almost any income level. The fix is changing what you are comparing yourself to. Try comparing your current situation to where you were a year ago instead of to where someone else is today.
Does social media make you spend more money?
Yes. Research consistently shows that exposure to conspicuous consumption on social media increases spending even when people are aware of the effect. The mechanism is social comparison. Seeing what others have triggers a desire to match or exceed it. Reducing social media consumption is one of the few changes that demonstrably reduces spending without requiring any deliberate budgeting effort.
How do I stop caring about what others have financially?
The most effective approach is not to stop caring but to change your information inputs. Unfollow accounts that trigger comparison. Limit time on platforms that optimize for showing you things you don't have. Build a reference group of people whose financial values match yours rather than people whose spending triggers your inadequacy. The comparison mechanism is automatic. You cannot turn it off. But you can control what it is comparing you to.
Is financial anxiety connected to social media?
Strongly yes. Studies show a consistent correlation between social media use particularly image-based platforms and financial anxiety especially in people aged 18 to 35. The content that performs best on these platforms tends to showcase consumption wealth and lifestyle upgrades which systematically distorts users' perception of what is financially normal and achievable.
What is lifestyle creep and how do I stop it?
Lifestyle creep is when your spending increases automatically as your income increases leaving you with the same amount of savings regardless of how much more you earn. It is driven largely by comparison. As your income grows your reference group changes and the new comparison activates the same spending pressure at a higher level. The only protection against it is automating your savings increases before the lifestyle expansion happens.
This is part of the Broke to Basics series on Money Map Today. If you know someone who is great at making money but still always feels behind, send them this. Sometimes the problem isn't the money. Sometimes it's the measuring stick.
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