I've felt kind of similarly. My wife and I are young--graduated college in 2018--and I feel like I've been a bit lied to about what constitutes "good financial decisions" over the past couple years. We've been squirreling away cash to have an emergency fund, long enough to support us being out of work for 6months, paying down her student loans, trying to wait on buying a car, etc--but our friends have been buying houses, cars, etc etc, and it seems like that's been the more prudent decision time and time again.

We delayed buying a house to have a bit more in savings? House prices skyrocket, our friends who leveraged the crap out of themselves look genius.

We wait to buy a car to have a bit more in savings / wait for the used market to come down? The used market goes up, our friends who bought new cars look like geniuses.

There's part of me that keeps waiting for a correction, esp. in the housing market, both so that houses come back into our budget range, but also maybe because there's part of me that feels vindictive about the fact that everyone who, to my sensibilities, seems to be acting recklessly are making out better than we are.

Some of that is reasonable, I suspect: we're very financially conservative relative to our peer group, which means we're going to miss out on some opportunities, and I don't want to be "proven right" in saving for a rainy day by everyone else having economic hardship, but I do feel rather confused about how we're "supposed" to behave in this market.

We're also remarkably well off, as is our peer group, which will obviously skew the data radically, but it also scares the crap out of me: if these are the thoughts we're having with a household income just barely under $200k this young, what is everyone else thinking?