Someone posted on r/AusFinance recently feeling genuinely bad about themselves. Sub-six-figure salary, low five figures in investments, super that wouldn’t cover a long weekend. In their forties. Their words: fat and bald. They wanted to know how to stop feeling jealous every time they opened the app.

It’s an honest post. More honest than most of what surrounds it.

Here’s the thing about a finance subreddit: it self-selects hard. The people most likely to post are the people with something to post about. Nobody opens Reddit to type “I saved $40 this fortnight and I’m pretty chuffed.” The posts that get traction are the ones with numbers that make your eyes water. Twenty-nine years old, $1.5 million in cash, wondering if they have to keep working. There’s a whole genre of it over on r/fiaustralia that reads like financial fan fiction. Some of it probably is. But some of it isn’t, and that’s almost worse.