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On lifestyle inflation, the negativity firehose, and why most of us already know what we need to do.

Every few years a study drops that sends the internet into a tailspin. The latest version comes from Goldman, which reported that roughly 40% of households earning $500,000 a year describe themselves as living paycheck to paycheck. Bloomberg ran a similar one in 2022, finding that a third of people earning $250,000 said their costs consumed their entire salary. These studies get picked up, shared breathlessly, and used as evidence of something deeply broken about the American economy.

And look, I'm not dismissing the structural stuff. Housing costs are up nearly 50% over the past five years. Student debt is real and the people carrying it often look wealthier than they are from the outside. The marginal tax rate between $200,000 and $400,000 is genuinely punishing enough that more than a few people have done the math on whether a promotion is actually worth it. AI and layoffs have made W2 income feel less permanent than it used to. These are legitimate pressures and they deserve honest conversation.

But I also make content every day for exactly this demographic, and I have a pretty good read on what's actually going on. And what's actually going on, in a lot of cases, is not a structural crisis. It's a psychology problem dressed up in the language of one.

I have a friend who has been married for a few years. Household income somewhere between $300,000 and $600,000, depending on how his sales year goes and what his wife's medical practice looks like. They own a home. They max out their retirement accounts, max their IRAs, contribute to their HSAs, and handle their mortgage before they think about anything discretionary. By any reasonable measure they are doing extremely well. They are, as I've told him directly, every financial advisor's dream client.

He also calls me periodically to talk through whether he and his wife are spending too much. Not in a crisis, not because something is actually wrong, but because there's this persistent low grade anxiety about whether they're doing enough. Whether the number in the account is the right number. Whether the life they're living is calibrated correctly against some benchmark he can't quite name.

And when I push on it, what I usually find underneath the anxiety isn't a math problem. It's a goals problem. W2 income feels increasingly fragile in a world where 30,000 people can get laid off via email on a Tuesday morning #oracle. When your income feels uncertain, even comfortable income, it's easy to develop a scarcity orientation that has very little relationship to your actual balance sheet. You start hoarding without knowing what you're hoarding for. You feel behind without being able to articulate what being ahead would even look like.

That's not a paycheck to paycheck problem. That's an absence of a north star dressed up as a financial one.

I went nearly 18 months without a reliable income when I was getting Habits off the ground and leaving the bank. And in that stretch I developed a scarcity mindset that took years to fully shake. Every dollar had weight. My weekly treat was a Dunkin cold brew because they had a buy one get one deal every Tuesday and the second one became the next morning's coffee. I was meticulous in a way that was partly discipline and partly low grade panic.

Now, as income has grown across Habits, content, and consulting, I save aggressively. I also just dropped $850 on a Bears playoff ticket without losing a lot of sleep over it. Both of those things are true simultaneously and I'm aware that makes me sound like a lunatic. But the point is that the relationship between how much money you make and how financially anxious you feel is a lot looser than these studies imply. I know people with a fraction of my income who sleep fine. I know people earning multiples of it who are genuinely tormented by money in ways that have nothing to do with their account balance.

The studies are measuring something real, but I don't think it's what they claim to be measuring. What they're actually capturing is the psychological experience of lifestyle inflation combined with a 24 hour negativity firehose and an algorithm that is extremely good at making you feel like everyone else has more figured out than you do. The Gilded Age had worse wealth inequality than we have today by almost every metric. The difference is that John D. Rockefeller wasn't live-tweeting his yacht purchase to 4 million followers while you were eating lunch.

I've watched this play out across every version of the income spectrum. The FIRE obsessed person who saves every dollar, skips every destination wedding, and is laser focused on hitting $500,000 in the bank by 35 so they can finally exhale. I respect the discipline genuinely. I also think it's a little tragic, because by the time they hit the number most of their friendships will have quietly reorganized around their absence. Not out of resentment. Just because if you stop showing up, life fills in around the gap.

And then I have friends who grew up in houses that looked wealthy from the outside and turned out to be carrying enormous student debt because the appearance of affluence and the reality of it had quietly diverged somewhere along the way. People who genuinely don't know what their monthly expenses are. People who earn well and feel broke and have never once sat down to figure out why, because looking at the actual numbers feels scarier than maintaining the ambient anxiety.

The studies that make headlines every few years aren't really about economics. They're rage bait, and effective rage bait, because they validate two completely different audiences simultaneously. The person earning $60,000 gets to feel righteous about the person earning $500,000 complaining. The person earning $500,000 gets to feel seen and validated in their anxiety. Nobody is challenged. Nobody has to actually look at their own behavior. The clicks are enormous and nothing changes.

Here is what I actually think, having spent years in this space, built a company around it, and talked to more people about their money psychology than I can count. Most people already know what they need to do. Live below your means. Save and invest consistently. Have some version of what tomorrow should look like. I’m not talking about the jargon terms of “goals” or “financial aspirations” that the financial services industry has exhaustingly pressed on to all of us. Point is you need a “why” that gives the saving a reason to exist beyond vague future anxiety. Which means, take the trip before you're ready. Start the family before you're ready. Stop optimizing your life around a moment of perfect readiness that is never going to arrive.

The problem isn't information. We are drowning in information. The problem is that money is emotional and we've built an entire media ecosystem designed to keep it as emotional and unresolved as possible, because resolved problems don't generate engagement.

My friend with the ~$500k household income is not living paycheck to paycheck. He's living inside an anxiety that his income level was supposed to have eliminated by now, and he's confused about why it didn't. The answer, as best I can tell, is that financial security and financial peace are not the same thing, and the second one requires knowing what you actually want. Which is a harder problem than any study is going to solve for you.

Most money problems aren't about money. They're about not knowing what the money is supposed to be for.

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