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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. 😁
Thanks for a great piece.
I reckon that I have a slightly different slant on comparison. I quite like to be a step below the “Joneses”. I embrace the idea of being neat, tidy and functional, but deliberately less than the Joneses. I take a certain backwards pride in having an older car, smaller house and cheaper clothes.
I suspect I’m not alone in the HD community.
Comparison is the thief of joy. I really believe that. No one shows you their bad times on social media. I don’t have Instagram or TikTok, just a rarely used Facebook account. If you need an antidote to that feeling you might get watching other people sit on Waikiki Beach sipping Mai Tais, just watch the evening news. Every night it seems are reports of peoples homes being burned by wildfires, every town in the midwest is flooding, a random stabbing in New York, a school shooting (we are back in school after all) and yes, even a guy being struck by lighting caught on a ring door camera. That’s what I saw on the NBC Evening News last week and it gave me the feeling of being somewhat fortunate, yet I also felt for all those getting flooded and burned living in areas where this never used to happen. Making a list of what I’m grateful for is often the best medicine. I hope everyone reading has something to be grateful for as well.
I’m two years younger than you and my grandparents had the outhouse, slop jar and Sears catalog. A coal fired stove was in the kitchen. My grandfather was a coal miner, and I remember him coming home from work covered in coal dust. After he retired from the mines, he got SS and a UMW pension. He also had Black Lung from his lifetime in the mines. My parents held the mortgage on the first house they owned. It had indoor plumbing and gas heat. My aunt lived in the house after they passed. Things have continued to improve in our world.
Wonderful contexts, W.D., thanks.
Not only is keeping up with the Joneses unwise, but the world’s resources cannot continue to support doing so.
Good post, WD, I was never a ‘keep up with the Joneses’ kind of guy. I bet that’s also true for many of the HumbleDollar followers. However, I know people who have either got in trouble trying to keep up, or are just addicted to acquiring lots of stuff. Same result either way.
Your statistic for disposable income is interesting. I’d submit that the entire country has succumbed to lifestyle creep. Don’t you dare take away my indoor plumbing and central AC!
I’m a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to social media. No Facebook, no Instagram, no TikTok, I still can’t tell you what any of them are for. The one exception is YouTube, which I use exclusively as a free repair manual. Although I’m not sure that’s what the founders had in mind.
What I never got into, even before social media existed, was keeping up with the Joneses. It’s just not in my wiring. I don’t think the platforms are really to blame either way, the kind of person who needs to compare themselves to others will always find a mirror, whether it’s a Facebook feed or just next door’s new car.
I’ve avoided those same media, Mark. I wish my wife’s phone wasn’t always making noises from Instagram. Does everything have to be a video? Too bad she’s not addicted to something quieter like HD.
As I like to say a lot of peoples’ doldrums is because they are on social media, where as a rule people don’t generally post the bad stuff, only the good. People compare their lives with the normal ups and downs to postings of people where they see lives where everything is perfect all the time. That life doesn’t exist, ever. The solution? Get off of social media!
Or perhaps follow social media that sets a better example. Anyone got any suggestions?
So true. I’ve never had a Facebook, Insta or TikTok account, and I abandoned Twitter in 2010 because it was taking too much time. I don’t watch a lot of TV either, certainly not things like the Kardashians, or Housewives. I grew up middle class and I suppose I am still middle class, but I don’t feel I’m missing out. Would I prefer to fly to England on a private jet instead of main cabin extra on AA? Of course, but I wouldn’t want the lifestyle that I imagine comes with it.
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