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The whole thing about "keeping up with the Joneses" is inherently about judging others' motivations as invalid.
WIth a phone, there are various reasons to want a new phone. But you certainly don't NEED one. The year-over-year improvements have largely become trivial. Mostly, camera upgrades marketed for impressing your peers. In any case, this tendency is certainly based on norms set by the marketing, which people follow. And there is some portion of this that is just conspicuous consumption.
I can't think of anyone who upgrades their phone other than normal hardware reasons, i.e.; cracked screens, decreased battery performance, etc.
Perhaps your peer group has a higher level of vanity around their phones than normal.
Can you provide a specific of someone you know upgrading their phone because their neighbor did so?
People who complain about others upgrading their phones are actually half a version of keeping up with the joneses.
Spending mental cycles on the possessions of others is the first criteria towards keeping up with the joneses, the second half is the purchase to keep up.
I worked at AT&T and then AT&T for about 8 years. I'm not talking about the anecdotal evidence of personal friends. I'm talking about broader consumer data.
For your information, here's a statistical study: https://www.statista.com/statistics/619788/average-smartphone-life/
This indicates an average of replacing a phone every ~2.7 years. That means there's someone that replaces their phone every year for each person who keeps their phone for 4 years. And many people keep them longer than that. Obviously, I'm not saying that EVERYONE does this. But obviously this is not uncommon.
I don't typically complain about this; it happens to be the topic of conversation here. It just sounds like you're taking it personally for some reason...