Carolyn Hax: How can I brag without bragging?

Dear Carolyn: This seems like such a minor issue, but it’s starting to really bother me. My friends and I are at an age when the people who’ve made it are really making it, and when the people who haven’t made it really haven’t. We’re fortunate to be in the first group.

Meanwhile, some of our friends are experiencing chronic unemployment or underemployment, or are encumbered with illness or other mishap, and are barely making ends meet.

I want to share my enthusiasm about an upcoming trip or other major purchase, but I don’t want to seem like I’m rubbing their faces in it. Another friend, similarly well off, manages to mention his income at every get-together and I don’t want to be THAT person.

Where’s the line between being happy about what I’m doing and rubbing it in? – Lucky in Life

Problems become easier to solve when you figure out what you’re trying to accomplish, so let’s find your goal in sharing “enthusiasm about … a major purchase.”

Um. “Bask in the glory of me”?

You try phrasing it without snark – it’s harder than it looks.

Playing it as straight as possible, let’s call your goal, “Tell people how happy I am and why.” (As opposed to just being happy, which involves no phrasing or audience-management.)

Is that a worthy aim, one you’d want friends to pursue with you? How about if they’re flush and you’re broke (more on which in a moment)?

Or would you prefer they had goals such as: be compassionate, be funny, be interesting, be supportive, be a good listener, be flexible, be inclusive? Or just, be good company? Be forgiving, too, is a good one when you need it, though it’s on us not to need it too often.

Of course your friends care about you, so when they ask you what’s new, sure, share that you’re moving next month or off to Spain tomorrow, with an emphasis on experiences, not acquisitions. And emphasis on others, since actually caring for friends above purchases inoculates you nicely against THAT-ness.

When you’re excited about something, OK, be joyful; if you can’t be human then you can’t be friends. Feigned nonchalance is tantamount to rubbing it in anyway.

Ask yourself, too, whether you have the humility and kindness to pull off the kind of enthusiasm that breeds joy instead of resentment. You’re cruising now, but you don’t get the last word on how long that lasts, and your luck and hard work might drop you at an age when all the things you thought you could count on go to [unprintable].

I hope you don’t get there, but plenty of people do, and visits from the [unprintable] fairy are orders of magnitude tougher on the ones who never dreamed it could happen to them.

As in, the ones who acted as if it could never happen to them. Around friends to whom it already did. Since that alone would make you THAT person, don’t have your crow unless you’re ready to eat it, too.