Why keeping up seems sensible

Before I argue with keeping up, I want to be fair to it, because the needs under it are real and the alternative, as it's usually presented, is worse.

It's belonging. The table is your people. Going where they go and doing what they do is what being one of them consists of. The sixty-eight pounds bought an evening with five friends, and that's not nothing.

It's not being the odd one out. Every group has someone who's difficult about money, and you've watched what happens to them. They get invited less. You'd rather pay the split.

It's generosity. You like buying the round. You like the friend's wedding being good. A person who counts every pound at a table is a person nobody wants at the table.

It's the friendship. The friendship is worth more than sixty-eight pounds, obviously, and if the friendship costs a split now and then, that's cheap.

Everyone's doing it. Your friends manage the restaurants, the neighbours managed the kitchen, the colleague managed the car. If they can, you can, and if you can't, something's wrong with you rather than with the pace.

You'd feel poor otherwise. Sitting out, ordering the cheap thing, driving the old car to the drive with the new one on it. There's a feeling there, and it's not a good one.

It's habit, too, at this point. The yes comes out before the price arrives because that's the order it's always come in, and a yes that's been said a hundred times at a hundred tables isn't a decision any more. It's a reflex with a card behind it.

And it's how life is now. Restaurants cost what they cost. Hen weekends are abroad. That's the world, and opting out of it is opting out of your friends' lives.

There are needs under all of this. To belong. To be generous. Not to be thought mean. Not to fall behind. Those are real and the method later is built to meet them. What I'll show is that keeping up meets them badly, that the pace you're keeping up with was set by nobody and can be moved by one person, and that the thing you'd feel if you stopped is a forecast, and the forecasts in this area run in a known direction.