Psychologist Jonathan Haidt says people don’t really communicate on social media so much as they perform for one another. - Morgan Housel

Being swayed by people playing a different game can also throw off how you think you’re supposed to spend your money. So much consumer spending, particularly in developed countries, is socially driven: subtly influenced by people you admire, and done because you subtly want people to admire you. But while we can see how much money other people spend on cars, homes, clothes, and vacations, we don’t get to see their goals, worries, and aspirations. A young lawyer aiming to be a partner at a prestigious law firm might need to maintain an appearance that I, a writer who can work in sweatpants, have no need for. But when his purchases set my own expectations, I’m wandering down a path of potential disappointment because I’m spending the money without the career boost he’s getting. We might not even have different styles. We’re just playing a different game. It took me years to figure this out. A takeaway here is that few things matter more with money than understanding your own time horizon and not being persuaded by the actions and behaviors of people playing different games than you are.

Karl Pillemer interviewed a thousand elderly Americans looking for the most important lessons they learned from decades of life experience. He wrote: No one — not a single person out of a thousand — said that to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make money to buy the things you want. No one — not a single person — said it’s important to be at least as wealthy as the people around you, and if you have more than they do it’s real success. No one — not a single person — said you should choose your work based on your desired future earning power.

People don’t want accuracy. They want certainty.