Why You Don’t Need To Keep Up With The Joneses

Why You Don’t Need To Keep Up With The Joneses

This is one of my favourite blog posts of 2014. In her aptly titled post “Give Me Gratitude or Give Me Debt,” Glennon of Momastery gives a totally new perspective on the difference between wanting and needing.

After she posted a picture of her kitchen, she was inundated with suggestions on how she could update it, along with pictures of what her kitchen ‘should’ look like. At first this made her see her beloved kitchen in a different light, thinking that maybe her readers were right – that the room was outdated.

Then, she realised that her kitchen had a working refrigerator, sink, coffee machine, and a full pantry.  She had everything she needed, which is more than a lot of people have.

So she could have knocked down her kitchen and spent thousands of dollars renovating, or she could be grateful that she had everything she needed to feed her family.

As G puts it, the Joneses are really just a gang of people in conference rooms constantly thinking up new “trends” to create irrelevant monthly emergencies for us.

We often lose sight of what is important, because trends and our desires will usually take the front seat.

Instead of trying to keep up with the Joneses, we could try being content with what we have. Then maybe we could avoid debt and financial hardship.