“It doesn’t matter how many best sellers you write, if you spend your time with bankers you’ll always feel poor” a very poignant quote from the wonderful David Brooks.
Bankers get a bad wrap. I have far too many links to both lovers & haters to pass comment on whether this is usually deserved but this particular point of contention really isn’t their fault. I’t ours.
They didn’t ask everyone else to compare their own lifestyles to theirs. They didn’t invite people to walk longingly around their favourite shoe shops with no intention of buying a thing, spend three months salary on holidays to their favourite destinations or browse the homes they are selling on Rightmove. And they certainly didn’t invite the press to publicise every ‘extravagance’ of their lifestyle for the nation to frown upon.
I could zoom in here on the term “Extravagance”. Defined as the lack of restraint in spending money or resources. Surely taking a loan to go on a two week trip to Hawaii shows less restraint than when the financial impact of the trip is felt like water of a ducks back? But this is not the point I am trying to make today.
The point is: everything is relative.
Whatever we do in life, we’ll always compare to something, to someone “better”.
No matter how well we did in our GCSEs, we’d always compare to the kid at the top of the class & despite them having no friends, social life, sporting or musical talents we’ll still feel useless.
No matter how pretty we are, we’ll always compare ourselves to Eva Mendez & feel like an ugly duckling.
No matter how well our Victoria Sponge turn out, we’ll always compare it to Mary Berry and apologise to our guests for our incompetence.
And no matter how much we earn, we’ll always want more!
How many of us have thought ‘I’ll be happy when I earn £x’ but then we get there & think ‘ooh, if I just earn’t another £5k I could xy&z’?
It’s human nature. We always compare ourselves to the next best. We forget or filter out the majority already below our current standard. As we progress so do our comparison sets. Physically, the places & people we spend our time with, mentally, the people & things we compare ourselves to.
And to make ourselves feel just a little bit worse about ourselves, we also have an innate tendency to make aspirational comparisons. Comparisons to things, to people we know are the exceptions, we know we are unique & often don’t actually want to achieve but still we compare ourselves to these “superior” things.
Bankers, to most people, form part of these aspirational sets.
And for this reason, it is not their fault.
It’s all relative.
We’d do better, feel happier, more satisfied & less angry if we honed our comparison sets to people like ourselves or reframed things to ask, how many bankers have written any books at all?
Contemplating why 