Growing up, money was something people carried but never spoke of. Even in the earlier days of my career, outside the privacy of a confidential financial review, the subject was almost entirely off-limits.
Even inside those rooms, clients would often hesitate, shuffling papers or deflecting questions rather than reveal their true numbers.
The cultural taboo around discussing income, debt, or net worth was so ingrained that extracting the facts felt less like advising and more like detective work. Silence was the norm. People could live next door to each other for decades without once discussing what they earned, what they saved, or how precarious their finances really were.
That silence has broken.
Today, money is everywhere. You cannot open Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube without being told how much someone earns, how little they work for it, or how quickly you can replicate their apparent success.
Financial conversation has escaped the meeting room and become part of the cultural bloodstream. On the surface, this is healthy. The taboo around money long prevented people from comparing notes or learning from each other’s mistakes.
Research from the University of Cambridge in 2022 even suggested that financial openness, when genuine, improves saving habits and reduces anxiety. People no longer have to feel alone when asking whether they should invest, save, or budget differently.
But with openness has come distortion.
Where once the silence left people guessing about their neighbour’s wealth, today the noise online is so deafening that truth has become impossible to separate from performance.
Influencers, “finfluencers,” and self-proclaimed wealth gurus have turned financial life into a spectacle - a clown show, even for those more cynical. Many exaggerate earnings, hide losses, or inflate lifestyles to sell an image, and with it, a product, a course, or a subscription.
A study by the FCA in 2023 found that one in six young investors made financial decisions based primarily on social media content.
The fallout is visible across markets. In the US, the collapse of FTX left countless retail investors burned after crypto influencers propelled legitimacy into what turned out to be fraud. In India, regulators have had to curb “stock market astrology” promoted by YouTube personalities promising impossible returns.
In my own meetings, I see the consequences directly. A few months ago, I sat down with a couple in Dubai who came to me in near-panic after maxing out three credit cards on a “luxury lifestyle masterclass” that promised to teach them how to buy property with “other people’s money.”
Their salaries were strong, together over £250,000 a year, but their savings were close to zero. Every month they watched people online claim to be buying apartments or holiday homes, and instead of questioning the claims, they assumed they were falling behind. Their debt was not the result of bad fortune but of comparison.
Then there was an online meeting more recently with an expat in Saudi Arabia. A man in his fifties, highly successful, who admitted he had delayed retirement planning for years because he felt inadequate.
“Everyone I follow online seems to have five properties by now,” he told me, “so what’s the point of starting late?”
The irony, of course, was that he had the means to retire comfortably if he began planning properly. But the sense of already being behind had frozen him into inaction.
And then, inevitably, the Crypto-Chaser.
The young professionals who sit across from me clutching screenshots of their trading accounts, flicking from images of their incredible +40% return one afternoon to their respective -85% drop weeks later.
“It looked like everyone else was winning,” I’m often told. The truth, realised only after the crash, is that most of those people were either lying or had already sold.
The insecurity is real, even when the numbers aren’t. And it’s powerful enough to warp behaviour. Some double down on risky bets to “catch up,” others delay planning altogether, paralysed by the fear that they are already too far behind.
The irony is painful. Social media has made it easier to discuss money but harder to see it clearly. The language of success has been colonised by those with the strongest incentive to mislead.
As an adviser, you learn quickly that the quietest client in the room often has the strongest balance sheet, while the loudest boasts often conceal fragile scaffolding.
Online, that truth is inverted: performance is everything, reality an afterthought.
Psychologists have long understood this tendency. Leon Festinger’s social comparison theory argued that people measure their own worth not in absolute terms, but by constantly evaluating themselves against others. That instinct is now weaponised at scale.
Every leased supercar filmed on JBR, every rented Airbnb presented as “my villa,” every cropped screenshot of a trading account; each of these is an invitation to feel less successful by comparison.
The effect is magnified in cities like Dubai, where wealth is not only earned but performed daily. It creates an endless arms race of appearance, where financial planning; the slow, quiet work of building lasting wealth, feels dull compared to the glamour of quick wins.
And yet, beneath the noise, the fundamentals haven’t changed. Compounding remains indifferent to Instagram. Diversification doesn’t care how many followers someone has.
Time in the market still beats timing the market, no matter how many “get rich quick” strategies flood your feed.
The paradox of this cultural moment is that while more people are talking about money than ever before, fewer are listening to the truths that matter.
The scroll never ends. Every day brings another reel of rented cars, filtered penthouses, or “six-figure side hustles” wrapped in neon captions. It’s a hall of mirrors where the loudest voices are often the least credible, and where comparison corrodes quietly, swipe by swipe.
Wealth isn’t built on curated feeds or borrowed backdrops. It’s built in silence, in discipline, and in decisions that rarely make good content. The internet will always shimmer with illusion. The question is whether you chase it, or step away to build something real.
If you’d like to cut through the noise and build a financial plan grounded in reality, speak to Skybound Wealth today.
With over 8 years of experience in wealth management and financial services, William Bailey has built his career on a strong foundation of client servicing and long-term relationship management. Since relocating to the UAE in 2018, he has continued to grow his international expertise, drawing on prior experience across both Europe and North America.
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