PSYCHOLOGICAL INSUFFICIENCY: THE RACE EVERYONE FINANCES AND NOBODY CAN WIN

Nov. 2026

The car is new. The body is trained. The photographs are impeccable. At last, a desirable life! Then another image arrives, another model, another body, another life apparently already ahead. Nothing has deteriorated. So why does yesterday’s success suddenly feel inadequate?

Human beings compared themselves long before capitalism. Recognition, status, imitation, and the fear of exclusion belong to social life; Festinger examined our tendency to evaluate ourselves through others (1954). But no biological law instructs us to buy a more expensive car. Cooperation is just as much a part of our social inheritance. Someone must organise comparison into a permanent purchasing obligation.

Capitalism gives distinction a price. Veblen described conspicuous consumption; Bourdieu showed how tastes and possessions mark social positions. Here lies the first trap: everyone can buy a better car, but everyone cannot outrank everyone else. When the same signs of superiority spread, they lose their distinctive power. The purchases succeed; the promise of collective superiority fails.

Yet the digital era adds a second engine. Your neighbour need not buy anything. The standard itself can move. Images of ideal bodies, cars, faces, holidays, and lifestyles are selected, amplified, personalised, and continually replaced. Adaptive systems learn what attracts attention and can keep exceptional images circulating as ordinary expectations. A car takes years to pay for; its imagined prestige can expire before the next instalment.

Now connect the engines. Our biosocial sensitivity to rank makes the images matter. Economic competition turns that sensitivity into expenditure. Digital machinery accelerates and redistributes the standards against which expenditure is judged. The disappointed person tries again, generating fresh consumption and behavioural signals. The machinery has another opportunity to learn what makes insufficiency profitable.

This is my hypothesis of machinically renewed psychological insufficiency. The person may objectively improve without moving closer to feeling adequate. The comparison group shifts; the ideal evolves; the body and the bank account cannot keep pace. Eventually the verdict migrates inward: I am not enough. An unstable economic reference has acquired the authority of a personal truth.

And the cruelest possibility? Even victory feeds the next defeat. Every improvement becomes material for a new standard, every standard another market for correcting the life it has just declared obsolete. Who owns the machinery that moves the finish line—and why should our sense of worth keep running after it?

Liviu Poenaru

References

Festinger, L. (1954), “A Theory of Social Comparison Processes,” Human Relations, 7, 117–140.

Veblen, T. (1899), The Theory of the Leisure Class.

Bourdieu, P. (1979), La Distinction.