Why do I feel like everyone my age has money figured out except me?
Everyone else looks sorted with money. You're not broken — you're experiencing a cognitive illusion. Here's what's actually going on.
You open Instagram on a Tuesday evening and there it is. A friend from uni, posting from a terrace in Lisbon. Another one announcing they’ve just bought a flat. Someone else talking about their pension contributions like it’s a completely normal thing to have opinions about.
And you’re sitting there with three browser tabs open — one of which is a bank statement you haven’t clicked on in eleven days.
The feeling that follows isn’t just envy. It’s quieter and more corrosive than that. It’s the specific, exhausting suspicion that you are the only one still winging it.
You’re not. And the reason you feel that way has a name.
The illusion has a name: pluralistic ignorance
In the 1970s, social psychologists Deborah Prentice and Dale Miller began documenting a pattern they called pluralistic ignorance. The core finding: people consistently misread private beliefs based on public behaviour. We look at what others do and say, assume it reflects how they feel, and then update our own self-assessment accordingly.
With money, it plays out like this.
Your friends don’t post about the credit card they’re quietly paying down. They don’t mention the ISA they set up three years ago and haven’t opened since. They don’t bring up the fact that their flat deposit came from a parental gift they feel weird about. What they post, what they mention at brunch, what they say with confidence at dinner — that’s the curated surface.
You’re comparing your internal chaos to everyone else’s external performance.
The mismatch is not a character flaw. It’s a predictable cognitive error, and behavioural economists have been documenting it for decades.
Why your brain makes it worse: the spotlight effect
There’s a second layer. Psychologist Thomas Gilovich identified something he called the spotlight effect — our tendency to dramatically overestimate how much other people are paying attention to us, and specifically to our failures.
When you make a financial mistake (an overdraft, a missed bill, a purchase you regretted immediately), it feels enormous. It feels visible. It feels like something people can see on your face.
They can’t. They’re busy worrying about their own version of the same thing.
Gilovich’s research showed that we inflate our own salience to others by roughly double. We think people notice us twice as much as they actually do. Apply that to money, and the shame spiral makes a kind of grim sense. You feel exposed by something that is, in reality, almost completely invisible to the people you’re comparing yourself to.
The financial shame you’re carrying is real. The audience you’re performing it for doesn’t exist in the way you think it does.
Why standard financial advice makes this worse
Here’s where most personal finance content gets it badly wrong.
It skips straight to the behaviour change. “Track your spending.” “Set up a budget.” “Start investing, even small amounts.” The advice is technically correct. The problem is that it assumes you’re operating from a neutral emotional baseline, and you’re not.
When you’re already in a comparison spiral, practical advice reads as confirmation that you’re behind. Every tip becomes evidence of the gap. “I should be doing that. I’m not doing that. There’s the proof.”
This is what the psychologist Brad Klontz calls a money script running in the background — an automatic belief about what money means and what it says about you. Klontz spent years categorising how these scripts form and how they drive avoidance behaviour. Financial avoidance (not looking, not opening, not engaging) is almost always downstream of shame, not laziness.
You’re not avoiding your finances because you don’t care. You’re avoiding them because caring feels dangerous.
What’s actually true about your peer group
Let me be specific, because general reassurance doesn’t shift this.
A 2023 YouGov survey found that fewer than a third of UK adults in the 25-35 age bracket described themselves as “financially confident.” Around half reported avoiding looking at their bank balance at some point in the previous month. The majority carried some form of consumer debt, whether credit card, overdraft, or buy-now-pay-later.
These are not struggling outliers. These are statistically normal people with normal incomes and normal amounts of financial mess.
The ones posting about pension contributions? Some of them have one auto-enrolled pension they’ve never logged into and a vague feeling that it’s “probably fine.” The ones who bought the flat? Several of them are now house-rich and cash-poor, quietly anxious about a boiler that’s making a new noise.
Nobody is giving you a full account of their finances. The confident performance is, in most cases, exactly that.
The one thing worth doing this week
I’m not going to suggest you build a budget. Not yet. That’s too many steps from where this feeling lives.
Instead, try lowering the cost of looking.
Open your banking app. Don’t do anything. Don’t categorise, don’t calculate, don’t judge. Just look at the number. Close it. That’s the whole task.
This sounds almost insultingly small. It’s not. What you’re doing is interrupting the avoidance loop at its earliest point. The moment you look and nothing catastrophic happens — no alarm sounds, no one appears to tell you you’ve failed — you give your nervous system a small piece of new information. Looking is safe.
Behavioural economists call this reducing the psychological barrier to engagement. Richard Thaler’s work on choice architecture shows that friction is often the entire reason people don’t act, not motivation, not intention. Remove one unit of friction and you change the probability of the next step.
You don’t need to fix everything this week. You need your brain to learn that looking doesn’t hurt.
The comparison trap has a specific shape
It’s worth naming the exact sequence, because naming it gives you a small amount of control over it.
Something triggers a comparison. A social media post, a conversation, a throwaway comment about a friend’s savings rate. Your brain registers a gap between them and you. That gap gets interpreted as evidence of your own inadequacy. That evidence triggers shame. Shame triggers avoidance. Avoidance means you never get accurate information about where you actually stand. Which means the next comparison hits an even larger imagined gap.
Pluralistic ignorance feeds the shame. The shame feeds the avoidance. The avoidance feeds the ignorance.
The exit point is not motivation. It’s information. Specifically: accurate information about yourself, which almost always shows that the gap is smaller than the shame suggests. And accurate information about others, which almost always shows that the performance you’re comparing yourself to is partial, curated, and in several cases quietly anxious in its own way.
What I actually see, working with people in their late twenties and thirties
People come to me after months or years of avoidance. They expect to be judged. They’ve already judged themselves.
What I find, consistently, is that the internal chaos they’ve been carrying does not match the external reality of their finances. Not because everything is fine — sometimes things genuinely need sorting — but because shame inflates the problem. It adds extra zeros. It turns a manageable gap into a catastrophe narrative.
As someone with an MSc in Behavioural Economics and years of working with people in exactly this position, I can tell you: the shame is almost always the main problem. The money stuff is usually workable. The shame is what keeps people from finding that out.
You are not uniquely bad at this. You are experiencing a completely predictable psychological response to a very specific social context, filtered through a brain that is doing exactly what evolution built it to do: scan for threat, assume the worst, brace.
The scan is misfiring. The threat is mostly imagined. The “everyone else has figured it out” feeling is, in large part, a cognitive illusion with peer-reviewed documentation.
One small next step
If you want to get a clearer picture of what’s actually driving your relationship with money (rather than what shame is telling you), the Money Beliefs Quiz is a good place to start. It takes about four minutes, and it’s built around the same research frameworks I’ve described here.
There’s no pressure to go further than the quiz. But most people find it useful to have a name for what they’ve been carrying.
The link is in the menu.
— Joel