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It’s a quirky thing: People compare themselves to their neighbors just as much in super-affluent neighborhoods as they do in regular neighborhoods.
Counterintuitive, right? You think that after achieving a certain modicum of success, you’d stop caring so much. But you don’t.
This explains why those super successful people in Hollywood were willing to break the law (and risk prison time) to illegally get their underachieving kids into elite universities…because even if they had more status than 99.9% of the general population, they couldn’t bear losing status in the eyes of people they live around.
There’s a reason for this, it’s called “Evolution”. Nature has taught us to judge ourselves not to some objective, universal metric, but how we’re doing in relation to our gang.
Which is also why when we hear that some celebrity in the papers is a multimillionaire, we don’t care, but when we hear about someone we went to junior high with being a multimillionaire, it really sticks in our craw.
We’ve evolved as social animals, so we measure ourselves socially. It’s just who we are.
This fellow in HBR calls it Fear of Other People’s Opinions, or “FOPO” for short. Worth checking out.
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