Today there’s a huge amount of information about personal finances, the importance of savings, wealth growth and management.  So much that it can be both overwhelming and intimidating.

If you’re in the 20-something to 30-something age range, there seems to be two prevailing message streams.

One, you’re falling behind.  Even if you’re making a decent salary, it may not be enough to pay down your student debt and keep up with the cost of living.  Home ownership, marriage and children – once the cornerstones of the American middle class – may seem a distant reality or even unattainable.

Two, you are (or should be) on the track to early retirement by aggressively saving and investing most of your salary.  The internet abounds with stories of millennials who retired in their thirties by driving crappy cars, living in crappy apartments, and eating crappy food.  Putting money before life, they worked crazy hours, skipped holidays, turned down invitations from family and friends, and squirreled away every dime. In the process, they FIREd a movement – Financial Independence, Retire Early – that puts the rest of us to shame.

While Internet reality may be neatly dichotomized between these two extremes, real life is not.  Most of us are somewhere in between, doing what we can.  The problem is that even when we’re doing our best to strike a reasonable work/life balance, we often feel like we’re coming up short.

Maybe we’re working too much or not enough?  Maybe we’re not making enough or saving too little?  Maybe we’re not spending enough time with our family and friends?  Maybe we feel like we’re stuck in a rut and not making enough progress toward achieving our goals?

Rubbing salt into the wound, Facebook drowns us in a miasma of feel good messaging from hundreds of our closest friends who are vacationing in Hawaii, skiing in Aspen, or wining and dining at their favorite local establishment.  Internet lifestyle gurus show us how to convert our bathrooms into home spas, while personal finance wizards tell us how to achieve financial independence as a stay-at-home internet entrepreneur.

It’s hard to resist the temptation to compare ourselves to these online wunderkinds.  While positive examples of success can motivate us to achieve more on our own, it often has the opposite effect.  When we compare the mundanity of our everyday existence to the carefully curated high-gloss profiles of online friends and influencers, of course we come up short.  Their awesomeness just makes us feel more ordinary and inadequate.

Before we collapse into a heap of self-pity, let’s try to remember that behind every perfect virtual persona there’s a flesh-and-blood human being who struggles and bleeds like the rest of us.  Have you ever noticed how your Facebook friends go dark when real life issues like divorce clash with the usual online narratives of summer vacations, birthday parties and puppy dogs?

It also helps to remember that looks can be deceiving and often are.  How can you tell if your internet fascination-of-the-month is on solid footing or propping up their fabulous lifestyle with mounting credit card debt?  You really can’t, can you?

Even when we compare ourselves to friends, colleagues and others like us, the differences can be profound:

• David and Max both graduated with law degrees from the University of Chicago. David graduated nearly debt free thanks to generous tuition support from his grandmother. Max has $175,000 in student debt.
• Beth and Andi are both married, live in neighboring communities, and teach at the same high school. Beth has no children.  Andi has two kids at home and a mother in failing health.
• Tammy and Cindy graduated from the same university, married cops, moved to the same suburb, and had kids about the same age. They met at work where they performed similar jobs.  After her divorce, Tammy became the primary breadwinner for herself and three kids.  At about the same time, Cindy’s husband received a generous inheritance and a promotion at work.

As these examples illustrate, we’re rarely on equal footing, even when the playing field appears level.  The challenge, as I see it, is to gauge our personal progress against our personal goals, not those of our family or friends.  The trick is to take a clear-eyed view of where we are versus where we want to go, and then develop a realistic, step-by-step plan to get there.

If your roadmap takes you all the way to financial independence in just a few years, it’s probably not realistic.  Aiming to retire at 35 is wishful thinking for all but a very few.  Besides, work is a good thing.  In addition to money, it provides structure, socialization, an opportunity to contribute, and often a sense of purpose.  Without it, you’d have a lot of empty time to fill.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by information overload or confused by conflicting expectations, this may be a good time to unplug for at least a few days and let your mind unwind. When you free yourself from the distraction of outside chatter, it will be easier to relax and hear your own thoughts.  Listen to them.  Hear what your clear mind has to say.  Then, with greater self-awareness, decide what to do.  Will you embrace external expectations and standards of success, or will you follow your internal compass that points to the true you?  (Consider that these paths are not mutually exclusive and may overlap.)

Whichever path you take toward securing your financial future, one of your first steps will be savings.  As you probably know from experience, two of the biggest obstacles to saving is getting started and consistency.  To help you get started and to encourage your on-going success, I developed Pay or Save, a game-like app that makes savings fun.