Latest / the Daily Quote - Positive Daily Inspiration and Motivational Quote of the Day / Unknown Author - "Remember, the life you're comparing yours to might be built on borrowed money."

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Unknown Author - "Remember, the life you're comparing yours to might be built on borrowed money." · the Daily Quote - Positive Daily Inspiration and Motivational Quote of the Day

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  Dot com. Welcome to the Daily Quote, the
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  podcast designed to kick start your day in a positive way.
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  I'm your host, Andrew McGivern, and this episode is brought to
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  you by the Great News Podcast. Why?
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  Because good news should be heard and the link is right here
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  in the show notes. Today's quote has no confirmed
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  original author, but it may be one of the most timely and
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  necessary pieces of modern wisdom that you'll hear this
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  year. And as you'll discover, 2
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  brilliant minds from very different centuries saw exactly
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  the same truth long before anyone put it into a false
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  sentence. The quote is this Remember the
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  life you're comparing yours to might be built on borrowed
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  money. Let's start way back in 1899,
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  Thorstein Beblin, Norwegian American economist, sociologist,
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  and one of the sharpest social critics in American history.
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  He published a book called The Theory of the Leisure Class.
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  It carved out a reputation for him as the first academic to
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  ever sit down and think seriously about wealth and
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  consumerism and how they interrelate in American Society.
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  In it, he coined the term conspicuous consumption to
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  describe how people use wasteful expenditures to signal status to
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  others. In other words, over 125 years
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  ago, before credit cards, before Instagram, before social media
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  existed in any form, Veblen had already identified the pattern.
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  You know, keeping up with the Joneses.
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  People spend money not primarily for their own enjoyment, but to
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  be seen spending it. The purchase isn't really the
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  point. The audience is.
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  Now jump forward to 2020 Morgan Husel, financial writer and
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  author of The Psychology of Money, one of the best selling
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  personal finance books ever written.
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  He makes the same observation with devastating precision.
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  He wrote. We tend to judge wealth by what
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  we see because that's the information we have in front of
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  us. We can't see people's bank
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  accounts or brokerage statements, so we rely on
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  outward appearances to gauge financial success.
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  Cars, homes, Instagram photos. Modern capitalism makes helping
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  people make it until they make it a cherished industry.
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  And then he delivers the line that connects directly to
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  today's quote. Someone driving $100,000 car
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  might be wealthy, but the only data point you have about their
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  wealth is that they have $100,000 less than they did
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  before they bought the car or $100,000 more debt.
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  That's all you know. The house, the car, the holiday,
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  the wardrobe, the curated life on social media.
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  None of it tells you whether the person behind it is building
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  wealth or building debt. And yet we compare ourselves to
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  those images as if they represent the full financial
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  truth. We feel inadequate against
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  nothing more than a performance. We measure our real life against
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  someone else's highlight reel, one that may be financed
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  entirely on borrowed money, manufactured for an audience and
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  quietly unraveling behind the scenes.
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  Who Saw Puts it simply, spending money to show people how much
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  money you have is the fastest way to have less money.
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  Beblin said the same thing in 1899 with more academic
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  language. The pattern is not new.
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  What's new is how visible it's become and how much damage the
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  comparison is quietly doing. I've caught myself in the
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  comparison trap more times than I'd like to admit.
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  One example is that I'm using a HILE PR40 microphone.
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  Back in the day when I first started podcasting back in 2008,
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  this was the vanity microphone of choice.
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  It was a more expensive microphone than you need, but if
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  you had it, wow, you're like Leo LaPorte or Cliff Ravenscraft or
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  all the other big podcasters that use this mic nowadays.
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  It's the sure SM 7B mic, you know, the one Rogan uses and
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  everybody else. They've all got them, all the
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  big podcasters. Now, should I go out and buy
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  that mic? I'd be lying if it didn't cross
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  my mind. I don't need a new mic.
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  It would kind of be a waste of money, but then I would have the
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  cool mic that everybody else has.
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  Well, I'm not buying the mic. I'm happy with my Aisle PR 40
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  and I'm going to listen to this quote and reaffirm that I'm
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  doing just fine with the Heil PR 40.
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  So here's the question, who are you currently comparing yourself
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  to? Who's life, who's success?
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  Who's apparent? Well, without any real knowledge
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  of what's underneath it. Because Veblen saw it in 1899,
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  Household documented it in 2020, and whoever put today's quote in
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  a single sentence understood it too.
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  That the life you're measuring yourself against may be entirely
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  built on borrowed money. It may just be an image,
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  something that isn't even true, carefully constructed and
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  financially fragile, and completely irrelevant to your
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  own path. Stop comparing your reality to
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  someone else's performance. Build something real, even if
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  nobody can see it yet. That's it for today.
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  I'm Andrew McGivern, signing off for now, but I'll be back
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  tomorrow. Same pod time, same pod station
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  with another daily quote.