Social Pressures of Spending
Where’s the peer pressure to live small today so that we might live comfortably tomorrow? Where’s the celebrity spokesperson to tell us how way cool it is to eschew the little luxuries of the moment in order to afford a long-term-care policy? Where’s the slick marketing campaign that can convince us to forgo a year’s worth of hair, makeup, and Botox injections to the forehead in order to pay an accountant to tell us we spend too much money and we’d be advised to downsize? And besides, none of our friends or neighbors are doing these things. Without a comparative yardstick, or the peer pressure to keep up with the Joneses’ retirement planning, we are not motivated to save. So we keep up with the Joneses in the usual way: consumption. An iPod for an iPod.
— Lee Eisenberg, The Number
