Keeping up with the Joneses

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If you're poor, then it's easy feel poor.

However, most rich people think they're not rich, because "people care about their standard of living in relation to their peers".

This phenomena is described by the idiom "Keeping up with the Joneses".

"Keeping up with the Joneses" is a early 1900s comic strip that depicted a family struggling to keep up with their neighbors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_u ... he_Joneses

"Inability to 'keep up with the Joneses' might result in dissatisfaction, even for people whose status is high".

So, rich people do not feel rich.

or

It's all about status. All most ceo's care about is how they stack up alongside other ceo's. Even their philanthropy is a contest.

even their philantropy is tax-avoidance schemes to promote their future interests,

True....but they also want to beat each other in the general population's impression of the quantity and quality of benevolence and charity.

You guys are missing something.

I get why you made this thread. People keep accumulating more wealth after they are already living in luxury. Sometimes this is a game, but it goes beyond that.

When people become super-rich, they will usually start bribing government officials. This is how a rich person became a full-blown plutocrat. When people become super-rich, they usually fund politicians and news organizations in order to secure their wealth. That way, they no longer need to take risks.

Rich people, in general, tend to hate democracy. Democracy gives the knuckle-dragging proletarians a voice. What if we let them have a voice? They might start fighting for their class interests!

That's the main difference between millionaires and billionaires. Both of them will usually live in a mansion with endless luxury. The main difference is that billionaires manipulate politicians like puppeteers, whereas millionaires only wish that they could do that.

It's not just about the game. It's about becoming a member of the "shadow government".

Conspiracy nuts are right when they say that the government is controlled by shadowy forces ... but these shadow forces aren't part of some secret organization. "The Illuminati" is just capitalism. It's not even a secret.

Some might be content with financial comfort where others are actually looking for power...


Organized or not and/or secret or not, those who have the gold are the ones who rule.

My grandfather, who was a frugal man, was particularly adverse to the idea of "Keeping up with the Joneses". I suppose I take after him on the matter, in the sense that, while I would like nice things, I don't care to keep up with anyone. I don't understand, for example, the allure of buying an expensive Gucci purse, just because it's an expensive Gucci purse. An expensive Gucci purse won't carry your belongings, or necessarily look any better than a no brand person from K-Mart.

That "usually" isn't the case out here in farm country. Their home and old pickup look pretty much like everyone else's home and old pickup - which is partly how they got to be millionaires - it ain't in your bank any more after you spend it.

I am similar in some regards. I used an iPhone 4 even when it was getting surpassed by different models until it stopped working. I now have a 6S and I will hold onto it for the same reason. My car is a 2009 model but I don't feel the need to get a new one.

I also don't mind buying cheap toothbrushes every few weeks instead of getting a $200 electric one that will break the bank even if it will last longer.

However, I will not use a cheap computer that has discount hardware and software installed on it. My father did that and it functioned way below optimal level but I didn't know it at the time.

It is better to keep up with the Jones than it is to keep up with the Kadashians.

All joking aside, it really does seem primarily like billionaires are equating the size of their investments with the size of their phallic appendages.

Even rival Star Trek clubs do this ...

"Keeping up the Joneses" does not refer to keeping up with millionairs but trying to keep up with your neighbors.

I grew up in an upper middle-class neighborhood, without being upper-middle myself. I found out just how much peer-pressure, dog-eats-dog, etc.. there is to social pecking order, at least in school, on the financial success of your parents. Even in the early 90's if you didn't have better than $80 jeans you were a loser, hands down.

Think about the baby-boomers growing up, ie. a very shallow generation that got pampered, the pampering cascaded, and you can see where standards of how much integrity you have - in a lot of places (perhaps not all) - has been too eclipsed by how much $$ and status you've accumulated.

I also had the opportunity of going to my first county charity-ball almost a year ago and getting the impression that almost every family in that place new their rank order in the top 500 families, all had inside jokes on each other, and if someone's daughter got pregnant out of wedlock or if someone's son or daughter went off and became a pagan or something how many slots that family would dip and what family rank order that their own family (not the one with the loss) would move up to.

Looking at all of that I'm somewhat forced to this conclusion - ie. that if our primary cultural value is competition this is how it will generally shake out. The good news perhaps is that, with automation, this just can't last. Otherwise the 27 club will start filling up fast with people who have nothing to do with rock-stardom. Even if such a self-loathing culture was forced by necessity for a bit I couldn't imagine people putting up with that for much more than a decade (especially with the internet and places to meet people of like minds) and it would be yet another place where men and women would be 'going their own way' and walking away from the dominant culture - fast - to do something else if they believed it was turning into something like the real Hunger Games based on the combination of extreme competition and scarcity of work.

I didn't have this problem. That which I don't care about is irrelevant to me. If person A treated person B should be treated poorly because they did not have designer jeans, I would regard person A as illogical (one could, however, argue that the person is logical in an evolutionary sense) and lacking integrity, and would not be the quality of person I would care to associate with. I've observed that many people who care about fashion to such a degree as to attempt to impose their fashion standards on others are actually very insecure. I have no desire to meet their fashion standards.

One quick subtlety - you tend not to have many choices insofar as caring when those people are walking on your heals, throwing you into lockers, or running up behind you, shoving, and sending you and your books through the air. Even where and when it didn't come down to active bullying - you also have the situation of being in your teens with next to nothing to draw validation from aside from a particular kind of cultural sour patch that demands maximal conformity including making all the mistakes that are perceived as displays of strength.

I think we can say a lot as adults but I'm not sure we're using our heads if we throw tautologies at elementary, jr. high, and highschool kids. I try to think of where I would have found such a well of strength to stand alone as a kid and the answer is - I'm pretty sure it's fictitious and most of the solid ground I've cobbled together to stand on comes from the kind of autonomy that I've been lucky enough to enjoy in the last decade or so of my life. TBH I'm pretty sure, the me that I am at 37, if I had gone back knowing everything I know now - I still wouldn't do all that much better socially.