Does suffering make success feel more legitimate?

“We paid 17% interest.”

And just like that, Sunday lunch becomes the Financial Hardship Olympics.

Someone mentions their mortgage repayment. Someone else recalls the early 1990s. Before long, the conversation has moved from what a household can afford to which generation has earned the right to complain.

There is a reasonable economic question here. Interest rates alone cannot establish how difficult a mortgage is to carry. The amount borrowed, household income, essential expenses and employment circumstances all matter. Comparing one percentage with another leaves a considerable amount out.

But as a financial therapy practitioner and cultural psychology researcher, I am interested in another question: why can someone else having an easier path feel so uncomfortable?

A person can want their children to be financially secure and still hesitate when that security arrives through a route they did not have. Help with a deposit. A more flexible working arrangement. A policy that makes entry into the housing market easier. The hesitation might concern genuine risks or questions of fairness. It might also contain something more personal: “What does their easier experience say about everything I went through?”

That is an interpretation worth exploring, rather than an explanation we should impose on every parent or every policy disagreement.

Psychology offers an intriguing starting point. Norton, Mochon and Ariely (2012) asked participants to assemble IKEA boxes, fold origami and build Lego creations. Across their experiments, people placed greater value on things they had successfully made themselves. The researchers called this the IKEA effect. Successful completion mattered: the effect dissipated when participants failed to finish or their creations were destroyed. Wiley Online Library

Anyone who has assembled flat-pack furniture may recognise the attachment. You know where the slightly crooked shelf came from. You were there for the missing screw and the moment the instructions began to look like a personal attack.

These experiments examined making objects, not enduring mortgage stress. They do not demonstrate that parents who struggled to buy a home resent assistance for their children. Effort and suffering are also different experiences. Nevertheless, the findings offer a useful analogy: our investment in producing an outcome can influence how much we value it.

A home may therefore carry meanings well beyond its market price. Consider someone who worked overtime for years, postponed holidays and worried about repayments. Their home might represent persistence, competence and the security they managed to create. The sacrifices are part of its personal meaning.

An interesting possibility is that the route to an achievement can become part of how we judge the achievement itself. “I worked hard for this” can gradually become “working hard in this particular way is what makes this deserved”. From there, someone else’s easier route may look suspect.

There is a consequential difference between recognising that hardship shaped us and treating hardship as a prerequisite for somebody else’s legitimacy.

Economic memory adds another layer. Malmendier and Nagel (2011) found that individuals’ experienced economic conditions were associated with later financial risk-taking. People who had experienced poorer stock market returns, for example, were less willing to take financial risks. Economic history can remain influential in subsequent decisions. doi.org

The study examined people’s own experiences, rather than the transmission of beliefs within families. For financial therapy, however, it raises a useful question: when does a lesson drawn from one person’s circumstances become an expectation applied to someone else’s?

“Never borrow” might have begun with a frightening period of unemployment. “Property is always the safest option” might reflect a particular purchase in a particular market. “You need to struggle first” might be an attempt to teach patience and resourcefulness. Those lessons deserve to be understood in context. They also deserve examination before they govern another person’s decisions.

This is where family conversations can become difficult. Imagine an adult child saying, “I don’t know how we’ll manage these repayments.” A parent replies, “We paid 17%.”

The parent may intend reassurance: difficult periods can be survived. They may also want their sacrifices acknowledged. The adult child may hear that their worry is excessive or that asking for help would demonstrate weakness. Neither interpretation has to be the speaker’s intention for the conversation to become strained.

Research reviewed by Conger, Conger and Martin (2010) links economic pressure with emotional distress and difficulties in family relationships. That literature does not directly test this dinner-table exchange. It does remind us that conversations about financial hardship occur within relationships already affected by that hardship. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Winning the historical comparison may do very little for the person trying to work out how to pay next month’s bills.

A more revealing conversation might begin with, “What was hardest about that period for you?” and continue with, “What is putting the most pressure on your household now?” Both questions leave room for the practical circumstances and the personal meaning of the experience.

There are legitimate reasons to scrutinise easier pathways. A smaller deposit can involve greater financial exposure. Family assistance may be unaffordable for the giver or create unequal treatment between siblings. Flexibility may shift responsibilities onto someone else. Those questions deserve specific consideration. “We had to struggle” cannot answer them on its own.

For me, the useful distinction is between passing on capacities and requiring a repetition of the conditions through which we acquired them. We can teach planning, patience and responsibility without assuming financial insecurity is the necessary teacher. We can recognise someone’s perseverance without making their hardship the standard everyone else must meet.

Perhaps part of the work is allowing our sacrifices to remain meaningful even when someone we love does not have to repeat them. Their easier path need not erase our achievement. It may be one of the outcomes we hoped that achievement would make possible.

When we talk about the next generation, do we want them to inherit our security, or repeat the struggle that produced it?

What would you like the next generation to find easier?

Conger, R. D., Conger, K. J., & Martin, M. J. (2010). Socioeconomic status, family processes, and individual development. Journal of Marriage and Family, 72(3), 685–704. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2010.00725.x

Malmendendier, U., & Nagel, S. (2011). Depression babies: Do macroeconomic experiences affect risk taking? The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126(1), 373–416. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjq004

Norton, M. I., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2012). The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 453–460. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2011.08.002