These dynamics play out on a much smaller level, too. Research that looked at fine-grained data from Canada found that when people won the lottery, their neighbors were more likely to run up their debts and file for bankruptcy—the idea being that they tried and failed to keep up with their lucky peers. In a different study, not as focused on such an extreme outcome, people tended to be less happy the more their neighbors earned.

“If you live in a neighborhood where everybody has about the same as you do, then you don’t feel as perpetually behind as [when] you’re in a place where it’s more diverse economically,” says Keith Payne, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies the mental effects of inequality.

Dunn also noted a couple of variables, other than peers, that might lead people to feel richer. She brought up a 2016 study that found people’s bank balances—viewed separately from just spending, or investments, or debt—to be, in its authors’ words, “of unique importance to life satisfaction.” “One reason why middle-income people might feel pretty good about their level of income is if they just happen to be living their lives in such a way that even if they don’t actually have a lot of net worth, but they always have 8,000 bucks in the bank,” Dunn speculated.

Perhaps it’d be more prudent to invest that money, Dunn noted, “but then it's tucked away and you don’t see it except maybe quarterly, when you check that balance—whereas your bank-account balance, you just see it so much that I think it shapes your sense of your financial security.”

She also suspects that people overrate the importance of earnings in feeling financially satisfied. “All of this talk about ‘income, income, income’ overlooks the fact that it matters a lot what you do with your money,” she said. As she and other researchers have found, spending money in certain ways can make people feel better; it generally helps to funnel more funds toward charity, memorable experiences (as opposed to material goods), and paying others to handle one’s most dreaded tasks, such as washing the dishes or cooking.

And these spending tactics don’t only work for affluent people. “It's not just how much you have—it's what you do with it,” Dunn told me. “If you make really good spending decisions, … you can turn a middle income into a fair bit of happiness."

Those are some of the main takeaways of the academic research that’s been done on this subject, but maybe financial coaches—people who have firsthand experience listening to people’s money problems—can fill in some answers that research can’t.

Maggie Germano, a financial coach in Washington, D.C., who works mostly but not exclusively with mid-career professional women, told me her clients are often under the wrong impression about what will ease their financial stress. “That’s actually something that I hear a lot, where they think that if they just increase income, that everything would get better,” she said. Yet even when they do earn more, they frequently remain frazzled by their finances and sometimes, Germano said, “still feel like they’re living paycheck to paycheck.”