Money Dysmorphia

“Body Dysmorphic Disorder” is a psychological condition that manifests as persistent and intense concern over one’s physical appearance.

While it’s common and normal to periodically feel not-great about one’s skin or weight or hair, then, someone suffering from Body Dysmorphia will tend to fixate on these issues, at times to the exclusion of other things in their lives, and in some cases to the point that they starve themselves, work out to an unhealthy level, and/or develop depressive symptoms and possibly even engage in self-harm or have suicidal thoughts (it hopefully goes without saying that if you’re having such thoughts, please seek help).

Recent research has shown that both Body Dysmorphia and associated issues, like eating disorders, are on the rise in young people in particular, seemingly as a result of exposure to social media.

The general theory is that because young people are shown gobs of well-polished, filtered images of people around the world via these platforms, and because people who share content on these networks often do so because they think they look good in the images and videos they post (which makes it more likely that any given image will be of someone looking really good), that creates an unreasonable expectation in the minds of young people.

With enough exposure to such networks and the media they distribute, teens may come to believe (subconsciously, if not consciously) that is how they’re supposed to look: this is the baseline standard of aesthetics, and if they don’t live up to it, there’s something wrong with them.

This is, of course, ridiculous. What’s posted on social networks will tend to feature people at their most-attractive (or hyper-attractive, as often their images are altered to look even “better,” according to their standards of attractiveness, than in real-life), not baseline-attractive.

The net-impact of this, though, is a miscalibration of users’ sense of normalcy and (to some degree at least) social competition.

A recent survey (performed on behalf of a not-unbiased financial services company—so take this with a grain of salt) suggests that about 45% of Gen Z and Millennial Americans are obsessed with being rich, and around 42% report experiencing what’s being called “Money Dysmorphia”: the feeling that everyone else is doing better off, financially, than they are.

As with body-related dysmorphia, the idea is that because we all spend a fair bit of time on these social networks where folks are sharing incredibly filtered and produced versions of themselves and their lives, it may seem like everyone else—including people we consider to be friends, but who we don’t even know—is making a lot of money and spending that money on cool, desirable stuff.

Consequently, we may experience a sense of insecurity and anxiety about our own financial situations, because we subconsciously compare ourselves not to other people with similar backgrounds, experiences, and other variables influencing their lives, and not real, pros-and-cons versions of other human beings, but with polished versions of everyone on the planet, including people who are among the wealthiest in the world (and those who are really good at making it look like they’re among the wealthiest in the world, despite that not being the case).

It’s arguably not unreasonable to worry about money, especially in the context of wobbly economic foundations and a whole lot of political, environmental, and social unknowns.

That said, because as social creatures we look to others to figure out what we should care about and want (a force called “Mimetic Desire”), our expectations and understandings are being hijacked by caricaturized versions of the people and lives we look at to glean this sort of information.

According to that same survey, 95% of people who reported suffering from Money Dysmorphia said that it negatively impacts their financial situations, 40% said it keeps them from building savings due to overspending, and 32% said it causes them to take on more debt than they would have, otherwise.

Just as Body Dysmorphia can cause people to do unhealthy things in response to feeling not attractive enough, then, so too can Money Dysmorphia nudge people toward bad financial decisions (like spending on expensive products to seem wealthier than they are) that keep them from building a more stable monetary foundation.