We’re obsessed with knowing where we stand. Are we ahead or behind? Winning or losing? Richer or poorer? But here’s the uncomfortable truth: when it comes to wealth, we’re playing a game where nobody can see the actual scoreboard, the rules keep changing, and half the players aren’t even on the field we think they’re on.Think about it. Right now, you probably have some sense of your financial situation relative to your peers. Maybe you feel like you’re doing pretty well, or maybe you feel like you’re falling behind. But that feeling is based almost entirely on illusion, on shadows and fragments of information that tell you virtually nothing about reality.
The Iceberg Problem
What you see of someone’s wealth is just the tip of the iceberg, and unlike actual icebergs where the underwater portion follows predictable physics, financial icebergs are completely random in their hidden dimensions. That colleague driving the luxury car? Could be leased with payments stretching their budget to the breaking point, their bank account perpetually hovering near zero. Your neighbor in the modest ranch house? Might be sitting on a $2 million investment portfolio and a paid-off property they bought decades ago for $80,000.The visible markers we use to gauge wealth—cars, homes, clothes, vacations plastered across social media—tell us almost nothing about the financial reality underneath. In fact, they often tell us the opposite of the truth. Someone living in apparent luxury might be drowning in debt, one missed paycheck away from catastrophe. Someone living modestly might have achieved financial independence years ago and simply chosen not to advertise it.I once knew two families living on the same suburban street. One had the immaculate lawn, the new cars in the driveway every few years, the pool, the extensive renovations. The other drove older vehicles, did their own landscaping, and lived in a house that looked essentially unchanged for decades. Everyone assumed the first family was wealthy. Turns out the second family had quietly accumulated enough wealth to retire early and travel the world, while the first family was drowning in home equity loans and credit card debt, working jobs they hated to maintain an image that impressed absolutely no one who mattered.
The Hidden Variables Nobody Talks About
Even if you could somehow peek at someone’s bank statements and investment accounts, you still wouldn’t know the full picture. Wealth exists in forms that never show up in casual observation and rarely even show up in direct financial statements.
Family money that will eventually transfer but hasn’t yet. Stock options that haven’t vested. Businesses with valuations that exist only on paper until someone actually buys them. Real estate holdings in other cities or countries. Trusts and inheritance arrangements that won’t materialize for years or decades. Pension values that represent future security but not current liquidity. Future earning potential that varies wildly by career trajectory, with a 30-year-old doctor still in residency having entirely different prospects than a 30-year-old at peak earnings in a field with limited growth.Then there are the liabilities you can’t see, the financial weights people carry invisibly. Student loans that eat up thousands each month. Medical debt from a health crisis nobody talks about. Aging parents who need financial support. Children with special needs requiring expensive care. Legal obligations from a divorce. Investments that went underwater and now represent losses rather than assets. A business that looks successful from the outside but operates on razor-thin margins.
Someone might have a high income but also high invisible drains on that income that you’d never guess. Someone else might have modest earnings but also have zero debt, strong family support systems, and low fixed costs. Who’s actually wealthier? It’s genuinely impossible to say from the outside.
The Relativity That Breaks the Comparison
Even wealth itself is relative in ways that make comparison meaningless. A million dollars means something entirely different in Manhattan than in rural Montana. The same amount of money provides vastly different levels of security, freedom, and options depending on cost of living, family size, health status, career stability, and personal goals.
Someone earning $80,000 in a low-cost area with no debt and minimal expenses might feel wealthier, sleep better at night, and have more actual freedom than someone earning $200,000 in an expensive city with high costs and obligations. Which one is actually ahead? The question itself doesn’t make sense.
And wealth isn’t just about the number in the account. It’s about security, freedom, stress levels, and options. It’s about the ability to make choices aligned with your values. Someone with modest savings but strong family support, good health, and low needs might experience more financial peace and wellbeing than someone with ten times the assets but constant anxiety about maintaining their lifestyle, proving themselves, or protecting what they’ve accumulated.
The Exhausting Performance
The impossibility of knowing where you truly stand creates a bizarre situation where people engage in elaborate performances of wealth, signaling and counter-signaling, spending enormous energy on displays that might not even be read correctly by the audience. You buy things to impress people who themselves are insecure about their standing, using markers that don’t actually indicate what they seem to indicate.It’s theater, and expensive theater at that. The cost isn’t just financial but emotional and psychological. The mental energy spent worrying about whether you’re keeping up, whether you look successful enough, whether others are judging your choices. The stress of maintaining appearances. The nagging sense that everyone else has figured out something you haven’t.
The Liberation Hidden in Uncertainty
Here’s the paradox that changes everything: the impossibility of truly measuring comparative wealth is actually profoundly freeing.You can’t know where you really stand relative to others, so why base your major life decisions on that unknowable metric? You can’t win a race when you don’t know where the finish line is, where the other runners actually are, or even if you’re all running in the same direction. You might not even be in the same race.What you can know is what matters to you. What brings you genuine satisfaction rather than performative validation. What aligns with your actual values rather than values you think you should have. What kind of life you want to build with the resources you have, whatever those resources might be relative to some invisible, unknowable average.The person who looks successful by conventional measures might be miserable, trapped in golden handcuffs, working a soul-crushing job they hate to maintain appearances for people whose opinions shouldn’t matter. The person who looks like they’re falling behind by those same measures might be building exactly the life they want, prioritizing time with family or pursuing meaningful work over maximum income, sleeping soundly at night while the “successful” person pops anxiety medication.
Your Scoreboard, Your Rules
When you truly accept that you can’t really know how you compare, and that the comparison wouldn’t be meaningful even if you could know, you’re free to define success on your own terms. Want to take a lower-paying job that gives you more time for your passions, your children, your creative pursuits? Go for it. You don’t actually know if you’re “falling behind” anyway, and the people you’re imagining yourself falling behind have their own hidden struggles and constraints.Want to splurge on something others might consider frivolous but brings you genuine, lasting joy? Do it. The people judging you have no idea what your actual financial picture looks like, what you’ve sacrificed elsewhere, what matters to you, or what their judgment is worth. The chase for external validation through visible wealth is not just exhausting but ultimately pointless. You’re trying to impress people who are themselves insecure about where they stand, using markers that are often inverse indicators of actual wealth, all while sacrificing the things that might actually make you happy and fulfilled.The only financial comparison that matters is between your current self and your past self. Are you more financially secure than you were five years ago? Are you building toward the life you actually want rather than the life you think you should want? Are you making progress on your own terms, whatever those terms might be?
The Freedom of Not Knowing
We’ll never have complete information about how our wealth compares to others, and that turns out to be okay. It was never a useful comparison anyway. The freedom to pursue what genuinely matters to you, without the paralysis of worrying about keeping up or falling behind in an invisible race, is more valuable than any ranking in an unknowable hierarchy.
So figure out what you actually want. Build toward that with intention and clarity. Let everyone else worry about their own scoreboard, because you’ll never see theirs accurately and they’ll never see yours. The race you think you’re running might be entirely in your head, and the finish line you’re chasing might not be where fulfillment actually lives.
Stop racing ghosts. Start running toward something real.
