A high school classmate's post lights up the screen: a picture of them gripping the steering wheel of a newly purchased car with a caption boasting their nine-figure income from a side hustle.

Scrolling a bit further, she sees a former colleague of her age was just appointed as department head. Anh puts down her phone and stares sleeplessly at the ceiling.

The communications specialist in HCMC has a monthly income of VND22 million (US$845), sufficient for a single person, but in the last six months, she has taken on three freelance projects that keeps her working in the evening and both weekend days.

Coffee dates with friends have been canceled, and home-cooked meals have been replaced by instant noodles eaten hurriedly at the desk.

"I took on extra work not because I was struggling to get by, but because every time I opened social media, I saw peers who had achieved so much in their lives, while I was standing still, and so I was determined to work as hard as I could for a breakthrough," she says.

Some social media applications on a mobile phone. Photo by Ngoc Thanh

According to the American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology, peer pressure occurs when an individual is influenced by members of a social group and changes their attitudes, values, or behaviors to match group norms.

Vietnam does not yet have a large body of research on this phenomenon. Nevertheless, keyword search statistics on Google in Vietnam for "What is peer pressure and how to deal with it?" continue to rise.

Rather than merely stop with feelings of anxiety, this pressure is turning into risky financial decisions. Quoc Huy, 28, a graphic designer living in Dong Nai, once had savings of VND400 million after 6 years of working.

But his life was disrupted when his schoolmates began actively discussing buying land, flipping apartments, and the trend of financial freedom before the age of 30 in group chats. "Going to class reunions and listening to friends talk about billions of dong (VND1 billion = $38,483)made me feel like a complacent and inferior person," he rues.

In April 2023, he decided to invest all his savings, borrow VND200 million from relatives, and take out a 20-year mortgage worth VND1.3 billion to buy an apartment in the suburbs.

Out of his monthly salary of VND25 million, VND16 million went straight into paying the principal and interest.

Many young people push themselves toward burnout and debt by constantly comparing their lives with peers who appear successful at a young age on social media. Illustration photo by Pixabay

A photo of the apartment keys posted on his social media page garnered over 500 likes and hundreds of congratulatory comments.

But soon after that he had to slash his living expenses to the bare minimum: He canceled his gym membership, declined all wedding invitations, brought cold rice to the office for lunch, and ran the air conditioner for just two hours a night to save electricity.

At the beginning of each month, when his phone buzzed with the notification that the mortgage payment went through, Huy would suffer from stomachaches caused by prolonged stress.

Vuong Nguyen Toan Thien, medical director of the Lumos Psychological Counseling and Therapy Center, says when one constantly sees others succeed, the person’s brain triggers a social comparison mechanism to locate their own standing. "The brain easily jumps to the conclusion that peers owning a house while you don't means you are a failure."

He says when someone is caught in the comparison trap, the boundary between striving for development and a toxic fear of missing out (FOMO) is erased.

A person with healthy motivation will head toward goals matching their physical condition and capabilities, but someone trapped in FOMO acts to escape feelings of inferiority, he explains.

Borrowing beyond their means and working to the point of exhaustion through the night are actually a compensation mechanism for anxiety, he warns.

When prolonged, this stimulates the adrenal glands to continuously secrete cortisol, causing immunodeficiency, sleep disorders, and eroding compassion for one’s self, he says.

Thien adds that psychological trauma is even more severe in individuals with those who have faced pressure from family to achieve or have a history of anxiety and depression.

Early symptoms include social withdrawal and insomnia, which later progress to panic attacks and chest tightness when presented with information about others' success.

To relieve this pressure, psychologists suggest that instead of comparing themselves with others, each person needs to build an emergency reserve fund equivalent to three to six months of basic living expenses before thinking about investing or purchasing large assets.

Controlling one’s social media feed by unfollowing or hiding accounts that frequently generate negative emotions is also a necessary step to reduce unconscious comparison stimuli.

After a year of struggling under the burden of his mortgage, Huy decided to put the apartment up for sale to clear his debt.

He did suffer a loss, but says he has shed the greatest burden of his life. He put the remaining money in a savings account and began renting a room near his workplace for VND3.5 million a month.

As for Anh, after fainting at her desk from exhaustion last month, she asked to withdraw from two of the three freelance projects.

Promptly at 10 pm every night, she places her phone in a corner of the room, turns off the Wi-Fi connection, and opens a book. "I realized that other people's houses or nine-figure salaries are not mandatory benchmarks for my life," she states.