You’re late for your meeting, the smell of petrichor transitions to brake dust and subterranean mildew. That layer you grabbed on the way out the door is removed like a perverse game of Twister as you contort your body around the stoic statues of fellow rat runners. To avoid eye contact you raise your gaze up to the stream of adverts along the carriage walls.
Amongst the betting sites and cleaning services you spot an advert for an investment app. It has a clean user interface and an undeniable allure of returns through the use of a monotonically growing account graph, if not for the tagline of “for illustrative purposes only”. One thing sticks in your mind as your eyes start moving on to the next, the number above the chart.
You can’t help compare in guilty indulgence your own savings to that of the figure glaring down at you. Is that the expected amount to be saved? Am I really behind my peers? Who is this mythical Jo Bloggs with their life together so? You shun your inadequacy, chalking up the figure to an advertising agency’s user research, employed to install adjectives such as “aspirational”.
As you arrive at your stop and the unspoken repositioning shuffle commences as others vie to stay on a station or two longer, you think to the day ahead and the realities of modern day living, leaving a todo in the back of your mind to gather dust — “setup a stock and shares ISA”.