Nobody asked what you make and I think that was fine actually

Okay, so I am apparently the last person on earth who thinks your salary is your own business.

Everywhere I look someone is posting their exact take-home pay in a LinkedIn comment like it’s a personality trait. Debt payoff countdowns. Net worth updates. The full financial autopsy, performed publicly, for strangers. And if you don’t participate? You’re the weird one now. You’re either hiding something embarrassing or hoarding something suspicious.

I don’t know when keeping your finances private became a character flaw, but I am not buying it.

Where did the pressure to share your money stuff even come from?

Financial TikTok and a pandemic did a number on us, and not entirely in a bad way. There’s a real argument that pay secrecy historically benefited employers way more than workers — research from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research has shown for years that when nobody talks about salaries, wage gaps thrive in the silence. That part is real and worth taking seriously.

But somewhere between that legitimate conversation and now, we ended up here — where sharing your exact debt number on Reddit is brave and keeping it to yourself is suspicious. Those are not the same thing. One is workers protecting each other. The other is a social media trend that got out of hand.

The whisper network about salaries that used to exist between trusted coworkers? It got a megaphone. And the megaphone has opinions about you if you don’t want to use it.

Is money transparency actually helping regular people?

In some spots, genuinely yes. Sites like Glassdoor and Levels.fyi have made salary negotiation way more concrete — if you know what the range actually is, you negotiate closer to market rate. That’s real money in real pockets and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

And the normalization of talking about debt has pulled some shame out of something that is genuinely widespread. The Federal Reserve’s consumer credit data shows Americans carrying trillions in non-mortgage debt. Pretending it’s a personal failing when it’s a systemic pattern doesn’t help anyone.

But here’s where I part ways with the trend. There’s a difference between being able to talk about money without shame and being expected to perform your finances for an audience. One is healthy. The other is just pressure with better branding.

Why does staying quiet about money feel rude now?

This is the part that genuinely gets under my skin. A new social pressure formed around transparency, and it cuts in weird directions nobody’s really talking about.

If you’re in a room full of people sharing their salaries and you decline, you get read as either embarrassed — you make less — or protective — you make more. Neither reads as neutral. The silence that used to just be polite now communicates something, and people will fill in the blank themselves. Usually wrong.

We went from don’t ask, don’t tell to your silence is a statement. And I don’t think that’s progress. I think that’s just a new version of social pressure wearing a transparency costume.

What’s the actual case for keeping your finances private?

Financial privacy protects you in concrete ways that the share-everything crowd tends to wave off. It keeps family members from forming opinions about how you spend. It keeps coworkers from resenting a number they’ve now made about themselves. It keeps you from becoming a target — or a charity case — based on what people think they know about your situation.

Not every workplace is safe for salary transparency conversations. Not every family is mature enough to handle the numbers without it becoming a whole thing at Thanksgiving. And not every internet stranger asking about your income has your best interests at heart.

The argument that you should share isn’t wrong in every context. But the argument that staying private is somehow selfish or regressive? That one I’m calling out. The risks of sharing are on you individually. The risks of a culture where silence equals suspicion are on all of us.

Does this mean the old money silence was actually good?

Not entirely — and I want to be honest about that. Back when I wrote about the weird social pressure around keeping up appearances, I talked about how a lot of what we call “manners” is actually just a system protecting whoever already has power. The old money taboo was partly that. Absolutely.

But the answer to a bad system isn’t always the opposite of that system. Sometimes the answer is just a little more nuance. Workers sharing salary data with each other to close a wage gap? Good use of transparency. Posting your net worth for engagement and then side-eyeing anyone who won’t do the same? That’s something else.

There’s a version of this conversation in the post I did on social pressure and what we owe each other — the idea that norms shift and suddenly the person who doesn’t comply is the one who looks weird. That’s what happened here. The norm flipped and now privacy looks like a secret.

So where does that leave us actually?

Money transparency as a concept has genuinely useful applications. Salary data, negotiation resources, debt normalization — those things have helped real people in measurable ways. I’m not arguing against any of that.

What I’m arguing against is the creeping idea that your financial life is public property now. That opting out of the performance of it makes you complicit in something. That the new openness is automatically more honest than the old privacy.

Some things are still allowed to be yours. Your bank account is one of them. But what do I know.

The fact that we flipped from never discuss money to your silence about money is suspicious in about five years is genuinely one of the weirder cultural pivots I’ve watched happen in real time.

I’m not saying seal yourself off and never talk about what you make. I’m saying you don’t owe anyone your numbers just because the internet decided transparency is a virtue now. Sharing financial information with the right people, in the right context, for the right reasons — great. Doing it because the pressure to perform your finances online got normalized — that’s not freedom.

Keep your money to your own self if you want to. That used to just be called minding your business.

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