Imagine a group of kids: some short, some tall, some gangly, some sturdy, each with a varying level of athletic ability. Some are coordinated and quick on their feet, while others resemble me as a child (read: running on wobbly knees and timid in the face of physical threat, destined instead for drama club).

There comes a time when each kid has to choose which activity they’d like to devote their energy to. Some of the tall kids will be drawn to basketball, but so too will a few of the vertically challenged ones. Some of the quick-witted ones will gravitate to chess club, but so too will some of the kids who are…well, less so. 

We wouldn’t expect only the tall children to be interested in basketball, because their desire (or lack thereof) to chuck an orange sphere at a bucket affixed to a pole 10 feet off the ground is not correlated with their height. The fact that the NBA is full of 7 ft. tall monsters is just survivorship bias, not proof of a lack of interest in the sport from people who are 5’3”. 

Wealth and taste work the same way. 

This is why we’re so tickled and amazed when wealthy people drive old cars or eat food off the Dollar Menu at McDonald’s—because it’s incongruous, like a kid who hits an early growth spurt opting to join the theater instead of the basketball team. Because they’re rich, we expect them to only engage in things that map to “rich person taste.” Caviar and Ferraris and the like. 

We find it decidedly less adorable when the taste <> wealth mismatch happens in the opposite direction—when the person without means is interested in the finer things. Then, we assign moral value to the lack of harmony in their ability and preferences. 

My dad used to tell me about experiencing this dissonance as a young man. Growing up, his family didn’t have a lot of money. But that didn’t prevent him from liking, say, nice cars or fine leather jackets or fancy watches. Why would it? His socioeconomic standing was out of his control, like his height or his natural wit. But his preference for an Audi instead of a Honda was just that—preference. No different than preferring basketball to chess club. His mom used to tell him, “You have champagne taste and a beer pocketbook.”

Now imagine our group of kids is exposed 24/7 to basketball games, recaps, and highlights. They’re immersed in basketball culture. Every day when they turn on the TV, they see reruns of NBA Championship games and old interviews with Kobe and Michael and Lebron. When they scroll on their phones, it’s like ESPN hacked their algorithms: basketball videos and inspirational quotes about playing good defense and…I don’t know, for reasons discussed earlier, I got cut pretty early in middle school tryouts so I’m running out of examples. But now, because of this inundation, short or tall, athletic or not, most of these kids will probably find themselves inexplicably interested in…what else? Basketball.

This is the world we actually live in, except it’s not basketball that we see all around us—it’s wealth. Upward mobility feels—despite its relative low likelihood in the US—almost ubiquitous. 

The families we see on TV? Upper middle class, at least. The personalities we see online? Most live (or pretend to live) top 1% lifestyles, often fueled by the very fact that the job of “influencer” pays handsomely, even if your niche is “van life rock climber.” The average car payment in the US is $729, which means—depending on where you live—even a short trip to the grocery store will probably surround you with relative opulence.

Our tastes and preferences are shaped by our innate desires and cultural influences far more than they’re shaped by our current economic ability, just like our group of kids’ love for basketball. Some liked it on their own, but most got there through repeated exposure in their always-on basketball culture. This is, understandably, a problem for the short kings in the group, who have now been trained to desire an outcome they’ll probably never have.  

A 2023 report from Edelman Financial Engines found that a third of Americans have spent more than they could afford on a discretionary purchase due to the pressures of keeping up with the “digital Joneses.” What’s more, they found a correlation between time spent on devices and likelihood to overspend: 51% of people who spend three or more hours per day on their phones reported this behavior, compared to less than one in five who scrolled for less than an hour each day (16%).

When you disconnect someone’s means from their lifestyle preferences, otherwise-befuddling choices begin to make sense. The rich person who drives the Accord? Well, their ability to make money is unrelated to their taste in automobiles. The person spending their meager paychecks on luxury travel and racking up credit card debt? Well, their choice of education and professional earning ability (or lack thereof) doesn’t really have anything to do with their preferences for First Class, does it? Credit cards are a little like steroids, in that way: They allow you entry to a world that you otherwise would be incapable of accessing on your own, which is why both are frowned upon but prevalent nonetheless. 

After all, the fact that places like Aspen and the Hamptons are full of rich people doesn’t mean people without money aren’t interested in vacationing to those places, too—they’re just the destination equivalents of the NBA teams full of 7 ft.-tall men. Except this time, the “height” is generational wealth. 

The answer, then, when you find yourself facing this mismatch, is to decide what’s easier to change: your preference or your ability. 

Would it be easier to learn to like beer, or to build a champagne pocketbook? Both are challenging: In a world full of champagne glorification, training yourself to be ambivalent about those white bubbles is an endless uphill battle. You can’t let your defenses become too porous, lest you find yourself blacking back in from a lie-flat Business Class seat to Europe.

Similarly, when the reality is that most humans are actually drinking water, very few can afford beer, and even fewer can afford champagne, hustling to achieve a Veuve Clicquot balance sheet might feel like a waste of time. 

If John Steinbeck was correct about Americans’ status as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” many of us have chosen the latter path. If you’d like to get off this ride, maybe the answer is obvious: Stay off your phone, where all the champagne propaganda lives.