Your Tribe and Your Cravings

Picture a new girl, Aayra, joining a class halfway through the year. On her first day she has no idea how this class behaves. By lunchtime she has started watching. Do they finish their homework or copy it in the corridor? Do they line up quietly or push? Do they share tiffin or hide it? Within a couple of weeks, without anyone telling her to, Aayra is doing roughly what the class around her does. If the class is calm and hard-working, she drifts toward calm and hard-working. If the class is loud and careless, she drifts that way instead. Nobody sat her down and gave orders. She simply became a little more like the people she was surrounded by, because that is what humans quietly do.

This chapter is about the exact same pull, but pointed at your money. Here is the plain, slightly uncomfortable idea: you do not decide your money habits alone. You catch them, the way you catch a yawn or an accent, from the people around you - your family, your friends, your office group, the people whose lives fill your phone screen. If the people around you treat saving as normal and showing off as a bit silly, you will find saving strangely easy. If the people around you treat spending as fun and saving as boring, you will find yourself spending without ever quite choosing to. The single biggest influence on what you do with your rupees is often not a fact or a calculation. It is what looks normal to the people near you.

And there is a second half to the idea, just as important. Every money habit you want to break - the impulse buy, the upgrade you did not need, the spending that leaves nothing at month-end - is really a craving underneath. A little itch that wants scratching. You cannot easily delete a craving. But you can often reframe it - change the story you tell yourself about it - so the same itch pulls you toward a good habit instead of a bad one. The two ideas fit together beautifully: pick a tribe whose normal is saving, and reframe your cravings so that saving feels like getting something rather than giving something up. Get those two right, and good money behaviour stops being a daily fight and starts feeling like simply being yourself.

Let us slow down and see why the people around you matter so much, because most people badly underestimate it. They imagine that being good with money is mostly about willpower - about being a strong-minded person who resists temptation. So when they overspend, they scold themselves: "I just need more discipline." But willpower is a small, tired muscle. It runs out by evening. The tribe, on the other hand, works on you all day long, silently, and never gets tired.

Think about how a habit actually forms. You do a thing, it feels normal and accepted, so you do it again. The word doing the heavy lifting there is normal. And normal is not something you invent by yourself - it is set by the people around you. If everyone in your circle takes a foreign holiday every year on a loan, then taking a foreign holiday on a loan feels normal, and not doing it starts to feel like you are missing out or falling behind. You do not experience this as pressure. You experience it as your own free choice - "I just felt like a nice holiday." But the wanting itself was quietly handed to you by the tribe.

This is why willpower keeps losing. Imagine trying to save money while every single person around you spends freely and gently teases anyone who is careful with cash. You are not just fighting your own itch to spend. You are swimming against the whole current of what your group treats as normal, and swimming against a current is exhausting in a way that eventually stops. Now imagine the opposite: you are the careful one in a group where being careful with money is admired, where people compare notes on SIPs the way others compare phones. Suddenly saving takes almost no willpower at all, because you are swimming with the current. Same person, same salary, same willpower - completely different result, because the tribe flipped from working against you to working for you.

That is the whole reason this matters. If you try to fix your money by gritting your teeth, you are relying on the weakest tool you own. If you fix your money by choosing a tribe whose normal already points the right way, you have put the strongest, most tireless force in your life on your side. The clever move is not to out-muscle your surroundings every day. It is to choose surroundings that make the right thing feel normal, and then let normal do the work.

We do not copy just one group. We copy at least three at once, and they pull on your money in different ways. Seeing them clearly is the first step to noticing when they are steering you.

The close few are the people you actually live and talk with - family, best friends, the colleagues you eat lunch with. Their pull is the strongest of all, because you see them every day and you badly want their approval. If your three closest friends all lease new cars, the pull to lease a new car is enormous, even if you never say so out loud. We copy the close few because being like them keeps us feeling accepted and safe inside the group.

The many are the crowd - everyone, the general public, "what people do." Their pull is quieter but very wide. When a whole crowd seems to be rushing into some hot investment, or when "everyone is buying property right now," you feel a tug to join simply because so many are doing it. The crowd feels like wisdom - surely all those people cannot be wrong? - even though a crowd is often just one loud story echoing through many mouths.

The powerful few are the people we look up to and want to resemble - the successful, the admired, the famous faces on the screen. Their pull is aspiration. We copy what powerful-looking people seem to own and do, because a part of us believes that copying their spending will make us more like them. This is the most dangerous pull of all, because the powerful few usually show you only their spending - the car, the watch, the holiday - and never the earning and saving that quietly paid for it.

Here is the practical punch of all this. You cannot easily change the crowd, and you certainly cannot change the famous faces on your screen. But the close few - the people you spend real time with, and the accounts you choose to fill your feed with - those you have far more say over than you think. And because the close few pull hardest, choosing them well is one of the most powerful money decisions you will ever make, even though it never looks like a money decision at all.

Let us put rupees on the table and watch the tribe do its quiet work. illustrative

Meet two young women who could hardly be more alike on paper. Haridya and Aarvi are the same age, both earn ₹70,000 a month, both are careful, sensible people, and both genuinely want to be good with money. The only real difference is the group they landed in when they started their jobs.

Haridya's close few - her flatmates and lunch group - treat money quietly. One of them casually mentions her SIP over chai. Another jokes that her old scooter "still runs perfectly, why would I change it?" When someone gets a raise, the group's normal reaction is "nice, are you bumping up your investing?" Nobody is preachy about it. Saving is simply what people like us do, the same way finishing your work is what people like us do. Haridya, wanting to fit in, starts an SIP of ₹20,000 a month in her first year almost without thinking about it. It never felt like willpower. It felt normal.

Aarvi's close few are just as kind and just as fun, but their normal is different. In her group, a new phone every year is expected, weekend outings are lavish, and someone who suggests saving is gently teased as "boring." When Aarvi got her job, the group's first reaction was "you have to celebrate - new phone!" So she did. Her normal became spending first and saving whatever survives, which most months is close to nothing. Aarvi is not weak-willed. She is behaving exactly the way her tribe treats as normal - the same thing Haridya is doing, just pointed the other way.

Now run the clock forward ten years, with both earning modestly more over time and both simply following their group's normal. Haridya's steady ₹20,000-a-month habit, growing at a plain long-term rate, builds into a corpus in the rough neighbourhood of ₹45–50 lakh. Aarvi, saving almost nothing because that was normal for her, arrives at ten years with a nicer phone, some lovely memories, and savings you could count on one hand. Same salary. Same intelligence. Same good intentions. The gap between them was not willpower or luck. It was which normal they absorbed. The people around you quietly set what feels normal, and most of us match that normal without noticing - so the group you sit inside can decide your savings more than your own resolve does.

You might think, "Fine, but ₹20,000 a month is only ₹20,000 a month - how did the gap get so wide?" The answer is that the tribe does not just change one month. It changes every month, and small differences repeated for years do not add up - they multiply. This is worth seeing slowly, because it explains why choosing your tribe early matters so much more than most people believe.

Every month Haridya invests, that money starts quietly earning. Next month's money joins it, and now both are earning. The month after, all of it is earning, plus the earnings are themselves earning. This is compounding, and it is gentle at first and then astonishing later. But compounding needs two things to work its magic: money going in, and time. Haridya's tribe gave her both - the habit put money in, and starting early gave it time. Aarvi's tribe stole both - little went in, and the years slipped past without it.

Look at the shape of that picture, because it holds a lesson. In year one, Haridya and Aarvi are barely apart - a few thousand rupees. If you judged the two tribes after twelve months, you might shrug and say it hardly matters which group you are in. That is the trap. The gap is almost invisible early and then fans open into a canyon, because Haridya's early rupees have the most time to compound and Aarvi's spent rupees have none. The cost of Aarvi's tribe was not the ₹20,000 she skipped each month. It was every rupee that ₹20,000 would have become over a decade - and you cannot compound money that was spent on a nicer phone. The tribe's real bill always arrives late, which is exactly why so few people connect the empty account at forty to the "normal" they absorbed at twenty-five.

Now to the second half of the chapter, which explains why the tribe's pull is so hard to resist from the inside, and what to do about it. Underneath every money habit is a craving - a small wanting. You do not crave the thing itself, exactly. You crave the feeling the thing promises. When Aarvi buys the new phone, she is not really craving glass and metal. She is craving the little glow of belonging, of being up-to-date, of not feeling left behind her group. The phone is just the nearest way to scratch that itch.

This matters because you cannot simply order a craving to go away. Telling yourself "stop wanting to belong" is useless - wanting to belong is built into being human. If you try to fight a craving head-on with willpower, the craving usually wins, because it is patient and your willpower is not. But there is a gentler, cleverer move. You cannot delete the craving, but you can often reframe it - change the story wrapped around it - so the same itch drives a good habit instead of a bad one.

Here is the reframe that matters most for money, and it is tiny but powerful. Most people tell themselves saving is about losing something. "I have to lock my money away." "I have to give up the fun purchase." Feel the shape of that sentence - it is all sacrifice, all a door closing. No wonder it feels miserable and no wonder it loses to the craving. Now change three words. Instead of "I have to lock money away," say "I get to buy a piece of my future freedom." Same rupees, same action, completely different feeling. One story says you are giving something up. The other says you are purchasing something wonderful - a future where you are not trapped, where you can say no to a bad boss, where a sudden bill does not become a crisis.

Notice what the reframe is really doing. It is not pretending the money is not tied up - the rupees really do go into the SIP and stay there. It is changing which feeling the action gives you. The craving underneath - the wish to feel good, to gain something, to move toward a better life - is exactly the same craving that used to drive the impulse buy. You have simply pointed it at a wiser target. That is the trick with cravings: do not wrestle them, redirect them.

Let us watch the reframe do real work on a real hesitation, in rupees. illustrative

Meet Arjun, twenty-eight, who earns ₹90,000 a month and has just been told by a careful friend that he should start a long-term SIP. Arjun likes the idea in theory but keeps flinching, and when he looks honestly at why, it is one sentence in his head: "But then I've locked away ₹25,000 every month - that money's gone, I can't touch it, what if I want it?" Framed like that, every month feels like a small loss, a door slamming, and so he keeps postponing. The craving to keep his money free and spendable wins, month after month, and a year slips by with nothing started.

Then Arjun tries the reframe, deliberately. He stops calling it "locking money away" and starts calling it, in his own head, "buying freedom for future-Arjun." He even makes it vivid: every ₹25,000 is a brick in a wall that will one day let him leave a job he hates, or start the small business he daydreams about, or simply sleep well during a bad month. Now the same transfer feels like a purchase he is excited to make, not a punishment. The craving hasn't vanished - he still itches to gain something, to feel good, to move his life forward - but it now points at the SIP instead of away from it.

Watch the arithmetic that follows from that one changed sentence. Arjun starts the ₹25,000 SIP and, because it feels like buying something he wants rather than surrendering something he loves, he actually keeps it going through boring months and scary ones. Over fifteen years, at a plain long-term rate, that steady habit grows into a corpus somewhere around ₹1.1–1.2 crore - enough to genuinely be the "freedom" he was picturing. The version of Arjun who kept the old story, who kept feeling the SIP as a loss and kept postponing, arrives at the same age with a longer memory of nice weekends and almost nothing built. The rupees were identical. The interest rate was identical. The only thing that changed was the story wrapped around the craving - and that story quietly decided which of the two Arjuns he became.

Now let us put both halves of the chapter together - the tribe and the craving - because they meet most dangerously in one place: status. A huge share of overspending is not really about wanting the thing. It is about wanting to signal to your tribe that you belong, or that you are doing well. The craving underneath is for rank, for respect, for not looking like you are falling behind. And the tribe sets exactly what counts as a winning signal - this year it is a particular phone, a particular car, a particular kind of holiday photographed a particular way. illustrative

Meet Rohan and Aman, two colleagues who earn almost the same. In their office, a certain feeling has taken hold: the people who are "doing well" drive a certain class of car. Nobody says this aloud, but everyone feels it. Aman feels the pull hard. He takes a loan and buys a ₹16 lakh car, with an EMI of about ₹32,000 a month for five years. For a few weeks it feels wonderful - he has sent the signal, he belongs among the winners, the craving for rank is scratched. But the glow fades fast, as it always does, and now he is simply ₹32,000 lighter every month, for years, with little to show for it beyond a depreciating machine.

Rohan feels the exact same pull - he is human, he also wants to be respected by his tribe - but he notices what the pull actually is. It is a status craving, and status is a game where you can only rise by making others look lower, which means there is always someone else to out-signal and the game never ends. So he quietly steps out of it. He keeps his older, perfectly good car, and routes the ₹32,000 he didn't spend on an EMI straight into an index SIP. He is not being preachy or superior about it; he simply refuses to play a game he cannot win. Over the five years of Aman's car loan, Rohan's redirected ₹32,000 a month grows into a serious sum - comfortably over ₹25 lakh - while Aman's car has lost much of its value and his loan is only just paid off. Same salary, same craving for respect, opposite outcomes, because one man played the status game and the other opted out of it. Chasing rank with your rupees is a game you can never finish, because someone will always out-signal you - so quietly stop keeping score, keep the old car, and route the money you'd have burned on signalling into things that actually compound.

The deep point is that Aman's overspending never felt like a decision to overspend. It felt like a decision to belong - to send the signal his tribe rewards. That is why status spending is so hard to spot in yourself: it always disguises itself as "I just really wanted the car." The escape is not to want respect less - you cannot switch that off - but to notice that the tribe's chosen signals are a trap, and to feed the craving for a good life by building one, not by advertising one.

The most common slip is not spending too much or saving too little on purpose. It is not noticing the tribe at all. People genuinely believe their money choices are their own free decisions, made in a private room, when in truth those choices are being gently written for them by whoever they spend time with and whatever fills their screen. Because the influence is invisible, it never gets questioned. "I just wanted it" is the sentence that hides a whole tribe.

The slip gets worse when the tribe is confident and united. If every single person around you is sure that a hot investment is a certain winner, or that a lavish lifestyle on loans is just "how things are done now," it takes real strength to trust your own quieter read against that wall of agreement. Most people cannot, and they fold - not because they are foolish, but because standing alone against a confident crowd is genuinely uncomfortable. And here is the sting: the crowd's confidence is often louder than it is wise. It is frequently just one story repeated through many mouths, so it feels like the weight of a hundred opinions when it is really the weight of one, echoed.

Now the honest cautions, because even this good idea can be pushed until it breaks.

First, "choose a saving tribe" does not mean drop the people you love because their money habits differ from yours. That would be a cold, lonely way to live, and it misreads the lesson. You do not need your whole life to be full of frugal people. You need some corner of it - a friend, a group, a few voices in your feed - where saving and long-term thinking are normal, so that the pull is not one hundred percent in the wrong direction. You are adjusting the balance of influences, not firing your family. Keep the people; just make sure they are not your only source of "normal."

Second, the reframe is a tool for good habits, not a licence to fool yourself. "I get to buy my future freedom" is honest, because the money really is going toward freedom. But the same trick can be twisted into a lie - "I get to treat myself" said before every impulse buy, or "I deserve this" to excuse the very status spending we just warned about. A reframe is healthy only when the new story is true. If you find yourself using a cheerful reframe to justify emptying your account, you have not redirected the craving - you have just given it a nicer costume.

Third, and most subtly: rejecting status games can quietly become a status game. If you start looking down on people for their new cars, or you take pride in being the most frugal person in the room and want everyone to know it, you have not escaped the game - you have just started competing in it from the other side. The whole point was to stop keeping score, not to win at scoring lowest. Real freedom from the tribe's pull is quiet. It does not need anyone to notice how little you spend. The person who has truly escaped the status game feels no need to announce that they have. So use the tribe and the reframe to steer yourself gently toward a good life - and then let the good life be enough, without turning even your wisdom into one more thing to show off.