The holiday period is a time when it is especially difficult not to compare your life to others. First it’s what kind of Christmas gifts, food, beverages and decor you can afford. After that it’s where you holiday and for how long. Even if you manage to go somewhere nice, there can be pervasive thoughts about the people who actually get to live there permanently or who own a holiday home and have unfettered access to their own slice of paradise. You scrimp and save year round to afford a seaside holiday only to see someone sailing a yacht through the bay.
Different levels of wealth are more visible during the holiday period than at any other time.
We all know comparison is the thief of joy, no doubt uttering this to ourselves as we rubberneck around the coastal real estate, but the problem is that we are hardwired for social comparison. The ability to compare ourselves to others and adjust is how we evolved as a species. For millennia, not ”going with the crowd” or not “keeping up with the Joneses” placed us in mortal danger. We noticed the people with the fire and unless we had the wherewithal to emulate them, our line was quickly bred out. We evolved to be deeply attuned to those around us and how we compared. Researchers estimate comparison dominates some 10 per cent of all our thoughts, on average.
Instead of emulating starting a fire or building wheels to transport things, we now try to emulate modern markers of progress or success – professional achievement and wealth. What exactly did they do to be able to afford that yacht? That school? Those clothes? Comparison can be an important motivating factor and help us aspire to great achievements, but it becomes a problem when we lack social or financial mobility. Social comparison is depressing and demotivating if we are constantly exposed to material wealth or achievement that is unattainable, for example fortunes underpinned by generational wealth or achievements underpinned by social privileges.
Increasing wealth inequality and stubborn social inequalities, combined with a social media parallel universe where we are frequently exposed to extreme wealth or achievement, means social comparison is less the self-improvement tool it once was and instead breeds resentment.
‘When excessive lifestyles become the norm, the natural human response is to be excessive and feel deprived if you are not.’
We can see the yacht, we know we want the yacht, but we can’t simply learn how to get a yacht. We likely will never get a yacht and then we feel hard done by, even though according to Maslow our needs are comfortably met and we are on a lovely holiday at the beach. The more people start getting yachts, the more deprived we feel and the more we feel entitled to a yacht.
In the 1950s, a Harvard sociologist named Samuel Stouffer started theorising about a concept he called “relative deprivation”. He demonstrated that the more an American soldier felt he was entitled to promotion, the more deprived he felt when he didn’t get it.
His research also showed the brutal and inhumane drills which were designed to get soldiers ready for combat as quickly as possible were not as effective as training based on more respectful interpersonal relations. When people feel hard done by, it can reduce their effectiveness rather than lighting a fire in their belly.
Unlike the yacht scenario, feelings of relative deprivation can be very much justified. Relative deprivation has spurred certain groups to highlight harmful inequalities and start social justice movements. Women who didn’t have the right to vote felt deprived in comparison to men who did. Poorly paid domestic workers felt deprived relative to workers in other industries and agitated for better conditions.
Materialistic relative deprivation, rather than deprivation based on moral rights, seems much more subjective. Obviously, not having access to secure housing is absolute deprivation, but then there are also people who feel deprived because they cannot afford a house with two bathrooms and a separate bedroom for each child. Single income families can feel deprived compared to dual income families even though in many instances they can technically afford to live on one income. A dual income family may be able to afford a bigger house or better holidays – their wealth and professional success is easily observed, where the successes of a single income family are private.
The more dual income families there are, the bigger the houses and flashier holidays we are frequently exposed to. Eventually, social comparison wins out and we transition to a dual income to “keep up”. If we experience relative deprivation for long enough, we actually feel deprived. Even a billionaire can feel relatively deprived in certain company. Shockingly, research shows relative deprivation has more negative health outcomes than actual deprivation. Whether or not you actually are deprived becomes irrelevant if you feel like a pauper.
Increased feelings of relative deprivation have been linked with increased suicide rates, crime and hostile sexism. Feeling relatively deprived can also reduce impulse control and thus creates vicious cycles in health and financial wellbeing. Less ability to delay gratification often means low-income individuals make constant smaller purchases to ease the discomfort. People who feel deprived are more likely to have difficulty controlling their substance use or dietary choices, which then creates more disadvantage and relative deprivation.
In the developed world, relative deprivation has much more relevance to policy development and societal woes than absolute deprivation. The distress is real in parts of the population that are relatively deprived, and this has led to the emergence of middle class welfare and increased social support. The more wealth is accumulated at the upper end, the more the deprived group will demand to be elevated in society. In 2022, researchers for China’s National Health Commission showed that increased social support did successfully mitigate many of the negative impacts of relative deprivation.
Relative deprivation has also spawned the practice of gratitude journalling which has been shown to improve mental health outcomes. Social support will only get us so far as relative deprivation is unable to be eliminated in capitalistic society. It could even be considered a prerequisite, the source of the drive to accumulate wealth. People will need tools to reduce their propensity for social comparison and thus reduce their sensitivity to relative deprivation.
Advertising and marketing also actively encourage social comparison and inflame feelings of relative deprivation. Since the insidious and ubiquitous nature of advertising is unlikely to change, we can expect relative deprivation to continue to pose problems in wider society. We can limit our exposure to advertising but we cannot ever truly be free of it.
A few months ago, my toddler broke the screen on our ageing non-smart television. We continued using it for a few weeks with half the screen working but eventually the whole screen went and we had a very large black radio. Apparently the stores don’t sell TVs that aren’t internet enabled anymore, so we got our first “smart” TV. We felt like we had moved into the space age overnight. It was luxurious for first few weeks, being able to watch whatever we wanted at any given moment. But now it is just our normal TV. We don’t know how we lived before. If we went back to a dumb TV we would almost certainly feel deprived.
The majority of people own a smart TV in Australia. Approximately 85 per cent of the global population own a smart phone, at an average cost of approximately $600 per handset. Australia’s average house size has doubled since the 1950s and we now have the biggest houses in the world. We spend more on powering and heating and cooling bigger homes. We are one of the largest markets for online fashion retailers, and in 2015 we were ranked the top spending nation in the world by statistics website Statista. When excessive lifestyles become the norm and are overrepresented on social media, the natural human response is to be excessive and feel deprived if you are not.
Increasing social supports is highly effective in addressing absolute deprivation but it can only ever be a Band-Aid for the moving target that is relative deprivation. People become accustomed to increased welfare, expect it and then feel deprived if they don’t get it. The most powerful mitigator of relative deprivation is not more money, it’s the awareness that you are not actually deprived.
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