A few days ago, I saw a TikTok video where the speaker expressed outrage at recent insensitive comments from influencer Jaclyn Hill. In the referenced video, posted on December 4, Hill lamented about not getting as many views as she had in the past: “When you have a million followers, but you’re getting 30,000 views, this is just not the way it used to be.” You can find the video below.
Comments below the video include “That sweatshirt is $140. Thats [sic] my entire weekly grocery budget that we can afford for our entire family” from user @Megan: Babe. Another comment, by @dkristel&co:, says, “We’re tired of watching influencers rub their wealth in our faces.” Clothes and accessories are an efficient way to communicate wealth, and are often worn as a status symbol. It seems Hill has done exactly that, without considering how her audience might feel.
Worth an estimated $1.5 million USD in 2018 (that figure is likely higher today), Hill began recording makeup tutorials on YouTube back in 2011. By 2015, she had a strong enough following that she released her own products in collaboration with the cosmetics brands Becca and Morphe Cosmetics. After those collabs, her growth has only continued, and she now has 5.4 million subscribers on YouTube and 9.4 million followers on TikTok and Instagram combined.
Is This Really The Hill To Die On?
Given that it’s these followers whose loyalty and praise have made her into who she is today, including her financial wealth, how did she get to a point where she’s complaining about it? This is despite people facing significant financial struggles due to inflation and salaries not keeping up. A November 2025 POLITICO poll found that, of the over 2,000 American adults surveyed, nearly half expressed hardship affording groceries, utility bills, health care, housing, and transportation.
Hill is no stranger to hardship (she was on food stamps when she started posting to YouTube). How could she have lost touch with the complex financial reality that millions of Americans deal with? While part of the answer may be that she is insensitive (I don’t follow her, so I don’t know her reputation), another part of it involves principles from psychology and behavioral economics, wherein money doesn’t change – our perception of it does.
As Income Grows, Our Relationship with Money Changes
Relative Utility
One helpful way to understand this shift is through the idea of relative utility. This economic theory suggests that the value we get from money depends less on its absolute value. Instead, its perceived value depends on what we are accustomed to and what we compare ourselves against. (“Utility” in economics refers to the satisfaction or benefit that a consumer derives from consuming a good or service.) When someone’s income rises dramatically, their baseline for what feels “normal” rises with it.
Expenses that would once have felt extravagant fade into the background, while new standards of success take their place: Michelin-star meals, larger homes, more expensive clothes. Over time, income gains that would meaningfully improve most people’s quality of life bring diminishing emotional returns.
In this framework, Hill’s frustration over declining views isn’t about survival or even comfort, but about a loss relative to her past peak and to the influencer peers she now compares herself to. Relative utility helps explain how genuine distress can coexist with extreme privilege, even as that distress feels profoundly out of touch to audiences whose financial reference points are rooted in meeting basic needs. It also helps us understand how she may have lost touch with what it feels like to be financially struggling, even though she experienced it not too long ago.
The Hedonic Treadmill
There is another theory, this one from psychology, that can explain the “out-of-touch” behavior we often see in influencer culture. This one is about a treadmill. It’s not a Peloton or Life Fitness treadmill, though; it’s a hedonic treadmill. First proposed by the research duo Brickman and Campbell in 1971, the theory holds that people tend to return quickly to a stable baseline level of happiness, even after major positive or negative life events.
For example, in a classic study by Brickman et al. (1978), the researchers interviewed both lottery winners and survivors of accidents who became paraplegic or quadriplegic as a result. They interviewed the participants, asking them to rate the pleasure they got from small, everyday activities, such as receiving a compliment or talking to a friend. They found that lottery winners were not significantly happier than the control group, those who had not won the lottery. By contrast, the survivors experienced greater joy in these moments than the lottery winners.
It’s with this theory in mind that we can understand that rising income doesn’t necessarily guarantee rising satisfaction in life. As the authors of the 1978 paper wrote, “If all things are judged by the extent to which they depart from a baseline of past experience, gradually even the most positive events will cease to have impact as they themselves are absorbed into the new baseline against which further events are judged.”
Many influencers start as regular people earning a regular income. Popularity on social media can offer them access to financial wealth and opportunities that most of us can’t even dream of. As we’ve seen, though, they will still return to their baseline level of happiness. What they do at that point is indicative of who they truly were before the wealth and fame.
Cultural Case Study: Wealth, Insensitivity, and Backlash
Seen through the lenses of relative utility and the hedonic treadmill, influencer controversies like Hill’s are less about a single insensitive comment and more about a profound psychological mismatch between creators and audiences.
Influencers and viewers operate on entirely different utility curves and baselines: for someone whose income and lifestyle have scaled rapidly, a drop in views can genuinely feel destabilizing. For audiences, many of whom are navigating stagnant wages, inflation, or chronic financial stress, “struggle” exists in far more concrete terms: paying rent, affording groceries, or covering medical bills.
A Difference At The Neurological Level
This “struggle” is not a moral failing: a 2023 study in China found that when one feels scarcity, neural activity in the part of the brain related to executive functioning changes. This neural activity can ultimately lead to people being unable to adapt well to changing environments and to reduced efficiency in work and learning. Another paper, this one taking a critical look at the literature on poverty, aligned with the idea that impoverishment contributes to an attentional focus on scarcity-related demands. In other words, people struggling financially often neglect other issues that aren’t directly related to day-to-day survival.
When money is top-of-mind for survival, as it is for more and more of us, watching someone with wealth frame minor losses as hardship can feel not just tone-deaf but insulting.
The resulting backlash is often mischaracterized as jealousy, when it is more accurately a reaction to this clash of baselines. One group measures loss relative to past excess, the other measuring stability relative to basic needs.
When $140 = $4,200
A dollar is a dollar, no matter how you spin it. Its absolute value stays the same no matter how much money you have; its emotional value doesn’t. Coming back to Jaclyn Hill, the $140 sweatshirt she wore in the video is, ironically, one of the more affordable clothing items I’ve seen in her recent videos. With that in mind, she may have viewed the sweatshirt as inexpensive, given that her relative perception of money differs from ours.
If she’s worth $1.5 million, as I mentioned at the start of the blog, the sweatshirt represents 0.009% of her wealth. For someone earning $50,000 a year with no savings and living paycheck to paycheck, that sweatshirt would be worth 0.28% of their wealth. By contrast, 0.28% of $1.5 million is $4,200. For Hill to feel what someone making $50k/year would feel buying that sweatshirt, she’d need to purchase something from a luxury brand. Perhaps a Prada Galleria small Saffiano leather bag ($4,500) or a medium Miu Miu Aventure nappa leather bag ($4,200).
The Balancing Act
I know that she has worked hard to get where she is, and she should absolutely enjoy her wealth. And part of what draws us to people like influencers, the royal family, and the Kardashians is that it gives us a glimpse into what life is like at the top 1%.
While feeling angry and frustrated at how people flaunt their wealth is 100% valid, it’s a bit of a balancing act. We need to remember that the rich are operating in a different world – one in which buying a $140 sweatshirt doesn’t decimate the budget for a week’s groceries. They are also prone to the same fallacies as we are – namely, relative utility and the hedonic treadmill.
Despite my attempts at humanizing them, influencers and the like can fail by forgetting how lucky they truly are to have material wealth. One can get rich, take a stroll on the hedonic treadmill, and remain conscientious about how their followers may be struggling.
Note: I did not write this post to disparage Hill – as I’ve said, I don’t follow her, and I don’t want to contribute to any hate towards her. Instead, her behavior helps us gain awareness of these behavioral principles and appreciate those who act differently.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you agree with my take?
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