How a sweeping trend to spend risks toppling everything we’ve built

You hear it from rabbanim and therapists. You hear it from young and not-so-young. Beyond the structural costs of frum life — mortgage, tuition, Yom Tov, simchahs — so many frum families are feeling a crushing pressure to meet a high standard of materialism that’s somehow become “normal.”

Have we always felt this consuming, sweeping need to present right? This doesn’t seem like standard peer pressure, because

it’s gone far beyond a single peer group or social bracket.

In this new reality, luxuries parade as “must-haves.” Items once reserved for the wealthy class are now standard on the wish lists of those solidly in the middle. And so we swipe and sigh, knowing we can’t afford the cost of not fitting in — and knowing, too, that we can’t afford the price tags of our socially induced spending.

Worse: As the focus has shifted from inside out, as so many of us spend precious resources on the outermost layer of our lives, we risk losing the essence of our identity — the basic understanding that a Jew lives not for this world, but for the next.

What’s causing this trend? Who’s gliding through it and who’s struggling? And is there any way out?