It would seem that keeping up with the Instagram-Joneses is a thing. New American research suggests that rising levels of debt, plus an inability to save, in both the UK and the US, could be partly attributed to Instagram providing boundless opportunities for people to post and brag about their wonderful holidays, delicious restaurant meals, new clothes and the rest.

Nor is everybody on Instagram a high-level “influencer” who’ll get paid for vapidly droning on about how glamorous their (online) lives are. Ordinary people would be getting themselves into debt trying to fund similar lifestyles.

It makes a gruesome kind of sense. If there are such things as “influencers”, then clearly there must also be the “influenced” – in this case, the overinfluenced. Worse, according to the report, as they’re constantly bombarded with images of wealth and luxury, the overinfluenced wouldn’t take their money problems that seriously, and so could end up getting into even deeper debt.

Basically, an entire generation is being lulled into a state of ruinous financial complacency by images of other people’s lifestyles that they aren’t even funding themselves – what could possibly go wrong? Perhaps someone needs to quickly invent an app that makes bankruptcy look photogenic.

• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist