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Emily Stewart covers business and economics for Vox and writes the newsletter The Big Squeeze, examining the ways ordinary people are being squeezed under capitalism. Before joining Vox, she worked for TheStreet.

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All that being said, why are we like this? Why do so many of us feel like whatever we have, it’s not sufficient?

A lot of it isn’t our fault, really. We live in a consumer economy that tells us that more is always better. We’re constantly being bombarded by more and more choices, which leads us to chase the latest version of the “best” of everything — an enthralling but impossible quest.

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I say all of this recognizing that I am in a bubble — I am a millennial living in New York City and surrounded largely by middle- and upper-middle-class people, though many of them don’t see themselves that way. I also say this as someone who is upwardly mobile from a solidly working-class background. If I could tell the child version of myself how things were going to turn out — that I’d be living in a big city, be able to afford to rent an apartment in said city, and have the chance to regularly take trips that involve a plane — she would not believe it. I am aware this is not the case for everyone in my generation or those before or after me. Still, I sometimes catch myself feeling like it’s not enough.

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There is nowhere you can look in society that isn’t screaming at us to spend, spend, spend — and, frankly, we view it as un-American to live any other way. It causes us to conflate nonessentials with essentials; we don’t just want the thing, we feel like we have to have it.

Modern technology puts all of this on overdrive. To “keep up with the Joneses” means contemplating an expanding universe of Joneses, because we’re not just comparing ourselves with our neighbors but also with that TikTok mom and YouTube hustler who seem to have everything figured out. The availability of so much information makes what’s possible a presence in our daily lives in a way that was much less salient a generation and two generations ago. If XYZ is possible for someone, you get to thinking, well, why isn’t that possible for me?

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Credit cards and smartphones make spending money easier than ever without having to do the math.

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“We just have a lot of people that really don’t know how to budget, and this is because of the credit card society,” said David Mick, a professor of commerce at the University of Virginia who focuses on a mix of consumer behavior, marketing, and mindfulness. “People have ready access to buy a lot of things quickly without a lot of thought.”

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Global Math Assessments: U.S. ranks near the bottom

According to PISA 2018, the United States scored below the OECD average for math proficiency. On a scale of 0–1,000, the average score in math proficiency among education systems ranged from 592 in China to 326 in the Dominican Republic. The US scored 478, while the OECD average was 489. This below-average score for the US put it below many Asian countries and autonomous areas, like Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea. It also puts the US significantly behind other western nations, like nearly all of Europe, Estonia, the UK, and Canada. Unfortunately, this isn’t new territory for American 15-year-olds, because America has been bouncing along the below-average scores for 20 years, since the PISA test began. In fact, while US math scores have not been declining, there’s also been no detectable change in since 2003.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Humble bragging.

Yup, that about sums it up.

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