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There was a time when we compared ourselves to the Joneses.
The Joneses lived across the street.
Maybe they had a newer car, a nicer house or a better vacation. We could see what they had because they were right there. Our world of comparison was relatively small.
Today, the Joneses live everywhere. Facebook. YouTube. Instagram. TikTok.
We see their houses, cars, vacations, restaurants, clothes and lifestyles. And among all those people are some of the wealthiest people on earth.
We don’t just compare ourselves with the people across the street anymore.
We compare ourselves with the Zuckerbergs, the Musks and the Bezoses of the world.
Let’s take a journey.
My grandmother was born in 1874, just nine years after the Civil War. I was born in 1955, just ten years after World War II.
I remember visiting her house. There was no indoor plumbing. A hand pump connected to a well sat in the kitchen. And outside was an outhouse—with a Sears catalog* ready for the pages to be ripped out and put to use.
Amazon would have been of no use to us back then.
Somewhere in this journey, you came into the story.
Wherever you entered, you probably remember a time when things we now consider necessities were luxuries—or didn’t exist at all.
Yet here we are. We have more. Much more.
Consider one measure: real disposable personal income per person. Disposable income is simply the money available after taxes to spend or save. In 1955, that income was about $1600 or $12,600 in today’s purchasing power. By 2025, it had risen to about $52,700—more than four times as much.
So why can it sometimes feel like we have less? Maybe it has something to do with what we see.
We live in an age where our eyes are constantly being fed.
Every day, images pour into our lives—places we haven’t been, things we don’t own, experiences we haven’t had and lives that look better than ours.
Our eyes take it all in.
And somewhere between the eye and the heart, what we see can become what we want, then what we need.
The old saying was keeping up with the Joneses. Today, the Joneses have billions of dollars, millions of followers and private jets. And they live in our phones.
You decide how this affects our society, our politics, and our inner well-being.
Personally, I think about my phone, my tablet, my computer, my car that practically drives itself, and the lights that automatically come on at dusk.
I have more convenience, more information, more entertainment and more choices than my grandmother could have imagined.
And yet, sometimes it just feels like there is something wrong.
I just can’t put my finger on it.
* If you need to know what a Sears catalog is, ask your parents.
“You decide how this affects our society, our politics, and our inner well-being.”
If I may paraphrase, we decide how this affects our own inner well-being.”
It’s seems easy to blame social media. The problem isn’t simply being on social media, it’s in large part how we choose to relate to it, or to the analog influencers in our lives.
I suspect that for someone with Jones-parity issues, it was probably harder to ignore the Joneses who were in your workplace or your neighborhood. Every. Single. Day.
Instagram is showing you what it has determined you want to look at. Don’t like what you see? Change your algorithm. Don’t like who you’re seeing on Facebook? Stop looking at them.
I’m not hugely into social media, but I am on it some, and I find my feed useful. My wife follows different stuff and her feed is entertaining. Neither of us want to be who we’re following.
If social media is toxic to you, by all means stay away from it. For us, we don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater because there’s some stuff on there we don’t care for. We apply a nontechnical solution – we ignore it and move on to something we do.
Thanks W.D. for the thought provoking piece.
I think you put your finger on it when you wrote that the Joneses now live in our phones. We may have more than previous generations could ever have imagined, but we’re also exposed every day to people who appear to have even more.
I’ve increasingly come to believe that contentment has less to do with how much we have and more to do with deciding what is enough. Once we can answer that question for ourselves, keeping up with the Joneses becomes a lot less important.
Comparison has made my life—and later, my wife’s life—much better.
I grew up in a below-average household. Whenever I thought I was poor, all I had to do was ride my bike to a poorer neighborhood. That quickly put things into perspective.
Decades later, when our portfolio had grown substantially, we still never paid much attention to keeping up with the Joneses. We always lived below our means and focused on what actually mattered to us rather than comparing ourselves with others.
Over the last several years, though, we’ve started spending a lot more. We’ve reached a point where there’s little reason to be conservative. We can’t take it with us, and our kids will still inherit plenty.
For us, comparison helped put life in perspective early on—and eventually, it also taught us when it was okay to enjoy what we had built.
So you rode your bike past my house. 😁