It’s Sunday. I wake up in my studio in Casablanca. Not the kind with a balcony and a marble kitchen island. The kind where the rent still manages to eat through most of what I make, where I’m eating overnight oats, tracking every dirham, saying no to things so quietly that nobody notices except me.
And yet every morning, the first thing I see on Instagram is someone my age, same hustle, same everything, living what looks like a completely different life. A new car. A trip somewhere warm and expensive. An apartment that looks like it was built for content. Keys in hand, smile on face, caption saying something like she believed she could so she did.
I close the app. I go back to my oats.
I used to think this feeling was a personal problem. A discipline issue, maybe. Or proof that I was behind in some race everyone else seemed to understand better than me. What I’ve slowly come to understand is that this feeling is not accidental, not personal, and definitely not unique to me. It is a condition. And it has a name.
Researchers have started calling it money dysmorphia: a distorted perception of your own financial reality, where you feel broke and falling behind regardless of what your actual numbers say. A study by Qualtrics found that 43% of Gen Z globally experience it. Nearly half. And of those, 95% say it is actively hurting their finances, not just their mood, their actual money decisions. They overspend to close a gap that isn’t real. They stop saving because they feel too far behind to start. They perform wealth because the anxiety of appearing to have nothing is louder, in the moment, than the discipline they’re trying to build.
This is happening in Casablanca and Cairo. In London and Lagos. In Jakarta, São Paulo, Madrid. The geography changes. The feeling is identical.
Because the cost of living crisis is not confined to one country. It is the defining story of being young right now, anywhere on this planet. In the United Kingdom, younger generations are the first in modern history expected to be poorer than their parents. In the United States, the average person says they would need to earn $233,000 a year just to feel financially comfortable (more than three times what the average worker actually makes). In cities across the world, rent has grown faster than wages for more than a decade, and the distance between what a young person earns and what a decent life costs has stretched into something that feels, some months, unbreathable.
I feel that distance from this small studio in Casablanca. You probably feel it from wherever you are reading this. The address changes. The weight of it doesn’t.
And into that gap between what we actually have and what we feel we should have. Social media pours an endless stream of people who appear to be on the other side of it. This is not a coincidence. It is the product. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok are specifically designed, at the algorithmic level, to surface content that is aspirational and visually compelling. Luxury apartments. Effortless travel. Cars, clothes, kitchens, skin that glows like someone has never worried about rent in their life. Two-thirds of Gen Z globally report feeling like they are not making or saving enough money compared to what they see on social media. That’s not two-thirds of people who are actually struggling. That’s two-thirds of an entire generation, regardless of their bank balance, looking at a screen and deciding they are losing.
What the screen does not show you is what funded the trip. What’s behind the apartment door. Whether the car is actually hers or three years of payments she’s managing to ignore for now. The curated surface hides the credit card debt, the family money, the brand deal, the staged background. But your brain cannot reliably tell the difference between a real signal and a performed one. It sees the apartment. It registers: she has one and I don’t. And then it quietly, without asking you, adjusts your understanding of where you stand.
And that adjusted understanding is where the real damage begins. Because when you feel behind, you don’t respond with patience. You respond by trying to close the gap, fast, in ways that feel productive but often aren’t. You buy something you don’t need because looking like you’re okay is more urgent than actually getting there. You skip the savings contribution because it’s small and what difference does small make when other people are already buying property? You invest in the appearance of progress rather than progress itself. And the research confirms this loop: feeling financially inadequate makes people more likely to overspend, take on debt, and stop building, the exact behaviors that make the real gap wider.
The trap catches people who are smart, aware, and trying. It always has. Every generation has faced its version, some signal of having arrived that their culture handed them, absorbed without question because everyone around them was following the same script. Owning a house. Living a certain lifestyle. Traveling extensively. Each era had its costume for success. What’s different about ours is the scale and the speed. We are not keeping up with the neighbors. We are keeping up with a global, algorithmically curated, never-ending feed of neighbors, all of them showing only their best six seconds, none of them showing the Tuesday morning where everything feels like too much.
The thing I’ve been slowly learning (slowly), because it is honestly hard, is that building something real asks you to stop competing with what you see and start competing with what you want to become. It asks you to let your actual numbers mean more to you than your perceived position in someone else’s feed. It asks you to find something deeply uncool in our generation: patience. The willingness to look like less than you are while the quiet work of becoming what you want to be happens in the background.
I still put money aside every month. It is not an impressive amount. But it’s mine. In ten years, compounded, it will mean something. The overnight oats, the skipped salon visits, the moderate clothes, none of that is deprivation. It is a choice to invest in the version of myself that isn’t performing for an audience, because I’ve noticed that the performing version is exhausted and the building version is actually kind of excited about what’s coming.
The hard truth about money dysmorphia is that it steals time from you. Every month you delay because you feel too far behind to start is a month of compounding you don’t get back. Every dirham, pound, euro, dollar spent on performing financial confidence is money that didn’t go toward building actual financial confidence. The feeling of being behind creates the reality of being behind, if you let it run long enough.
My studio still has flickering light in the kitchen. My feed still shows people who look like they’re winning something I haven’t figured out yet. But I’m starting to understand that they are not ahead of me. They are just louder about where they are. And where they are, half the time, is exactly where I am, just with a better filter and a story they tell themselves about what it means.
I’m starting to think the flickering light in my kitchen is kind of the point.