Peer Pressure Spending in the Twenty-Something Crowd (Part 1 of a 2 Part Series)
I can be like a vulture when a taboo topic comes up. Nina’s Ten Questions for Lane Hudson unearthed a taboo topic that I’d like to shine under a spotlight, call a large crowd over, and examine until the dead horse wakes up and asks, “Can you please stop?”
Lane brilliantly summed up an issue almost never talked about (except perhaps by some other personal finance bloggers): “The hardest thing for me has always been to live within my means and not the means of those around me.”
Yes! I wish that’s something I could scream from every rooftop in the country just to get people talking about the issue of keeping up appearances with those around you. In part one of this series, I think it would be fun to apply some “finance psychology” to this problem in order to understand personal reasons for stepping outside your means to keep up with the crowd.
Notice I don’t mention income differences. The salary range in a group of friends mysteriously seems to not matter when you’re trying to catch up or let loose with friends over dinner, drinks or a night on the town. It’s even more challenging when you’re new to a city and you want to make connections, fit in, and have a sense of belonging. At the end of the night, the tab must be split, rounds must be bought, and everyone must have fun, no matter what the cost. At least, that’s what peer pressure dictates when the night is in full swing.
This issue is not exclusive to a circle of friends, but is even evidenced when around co-workers, strangers on the street or at a bar. If you’re young and fabulous, there’s a compulsion to strut your stuff, whether it be your physical assets, or material assets, and it takes money to strut these both.
In doing research for this post, I was happy and relieved to find tips on how to cope with comparing your financial success to that of your peers. It’s great to have a plan to combat this very natural tendency to compare yourself and live to a standard set by others. But it’s also good to know why you need this plan.
I have a few suspicions as to why I need a plan, and saying so will be cathartic. I’m pretty sure it had something to do with growing up on status-conscious Long Island, NY. However, I also had a cultural and class issue to grapple with and understand.
You can’t necessarily tell by looking at me because of my light features, but my parents are actually immigrants from South America. My father came to this country and achieved the American dream. He worked hard, saved money, and opened his own business, doing well enough to put his five kids through college and spoil me a little because I’m the youngest. However, because we were one of the few minority families in the neighborhood (and not always very welcome), I watched my dad put effort into proving we’re doing just as well as our neighbors. For me, growing up with this “we’re good enough to live here” background noise on a daily basis deeply affected how I used to relate to people. I often felt judged and mistreated for being a minority, and one of the ways I tried to get people to take me seriously was by, of course, having nice things and keeping up with the rest of the kids.
Thankfully, my struggles with issues around my culture are well in the past, but changing my relationship with money and spending developed in my formative years has been no easy task. Knowing this makes me feel better during those moments when I must fight back an urge to splurge on new clothes or a night out. I know I’ve worked hard and come a long way in being wise about my money, and by sticking with a plan, I’ll keep going further.
If you dig deep enough and consider why you spend the way you do, you may find some motivating reasons to change your spending habits. Please feel free to share whatever you come up with. Rather than creating some peer pressure spending habits, perhaps we can create some peer pressure honesty about our finances.
In part two of this series, we’ll talk about specific examples of how twenty-somethings can confront the challenge of living within your means, and only your means.
John,
Good post. My friends and I do a blog of sorts mostly for us and certainly nothing as fancy as Queercents. One question that we try to tackle honestly is how much “Queer identity”, in particular, is itself indexed onto consumption. You write: “If you’re young and fabulous, there’s a compulsion to strut your stuff, whether it be your physical assets, or material assets, and it takes money to strut these both”. My question is how much do we all problematically assume that expressing a Queer identity itself is about the clothes, the vacations, the neighborhoods, the parties, the gym, the television shows, etc. Think about it: if asked what on earth “gay culture” or “queer aesthetics” are, many of us are more apt to start things right out of consumer culture than with the writings of James Baldwin, for example. The pressures professional class gay (mostly white) men face (from marketers and peers) to go to a circuit party, Fire Island, Mykanos and to shop for certain clothing styles have to do with asserting “gayness” and fostering bonds of community, however problematic, complicated and understandable that is all at the same time. The stakes run higher than showing others up or claiming a space within a hierarchy. For many, the stakes are the possibilities for identity itself. What do we do about this? How do we negotiate life on the fault-line without simply falling into a libertarian ethic as so many groups in American history before us have done?
I think homophobia among straights usually is to blame when they are quick to critique Queer consumerism and materialism but not their own quite obvious garden varieties of the same. The truth is that a consumerist ethic runs deeply through all aspects of American culture though histories differ and ways of tackling it in different communities will, thus, need to differ. Within the LGBT community, some thinking has begun and we must not be afraid to engage in self-criticism. One such title is Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market by Alexandra Chasin. What do you think?
By the way, while my friends and I tend to be critical of naturalized consumerist ethics, it is also true that it makes sense that the first visible, politically strong Queer movements have found their most immediate allies in consumer society given how displaced we have been from legal, familial and religious institutions as well as within other communities of resistance. Still, one has to ask: what is the difference between excluding someone from a community because of who they sleep with, who they love or what their fantasies are about and excluding them simply because they don’t have the price of admission to get into the Queer temple or to engage in the requisite rituals of Queer purification (the shopping makeover, bondage to the law of the gym, etc.)?
Great comment! My partner and I actually spent an hour and a half discussing points raised by Harvard Student. Living in the Bay Area, we see a broad socio-economic spectrum of the LGBT community. That doesn’t necessarily mean the LGBT community is inclusive. We also witness a “price of admission” for acceptance by queers, but we were torn about how this aspect is different from society in general. It came down to asking ourselves about the issue of selling out: why we do it, where we do it, and for what purpose or gain? The topic is something we have yet to sort out, and will definitely be the topic of a future post.