Housel’s point also highlights how status games are hard to win because the “audience” keeps changing. There will always be someone with a newer car, a bigger house, or a more extravagant vacation, so spending to impress becomes an arms race with no finish line. In practice, the reward is temporary while the cost is permanent.
Thorstein Veblen’s idea of conspicuous consumption in *The Theory of the Leisure Class* (1899) describes this pattern as spending designed to display social rank. Linking that to Housel’s warning, signaling can become a financial strategy that produces the opposite of its intended message: less capacity, fewer options, and tighter constraints. [...]
