195. Why Keeping Up Is Costing Your Family More Than You Think

What happens when comparison stops being local and becomes constant? In this episode, Laura unpacks the keeping-up trap—how social media, lifestyle pressure, kids’ activities, home aesthetics, and other people’s highlight reels can quietly make your real life feel small, stressful, and behind. 

Using real-life examples from her own moving season, Laura talks about the pressure to create a beautiful life that looks good online, the discontentment that comes from comparing your real life to someone else’s curated moments, and the financial and relational cost of building around appearances instead of values. She also explores how comparison affects kids, marriage, spending, scheduling, and peace in the home. 

In this episode, you’ll learn:

•  Why comparison used to be limited—and why it’s so much more dangerous now 
•  How discontentment fuels overspending, debt, and schedule pressure 
•  What the keeping-up trap can do to your kids, marriage, and home life 
•  How to protect your peace by reducing exposure and getting honest about what triggers comparison 
•  Why defining your family values is one of the best ways to stop building around pressure and start building around peace 

Listener Note

Laura also shares a quick listener survey in this episode. It takes about two minutes, and when you fill it out and leave your name and email, you’ll be entered to win a $50 gift card. Click this link.

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Transcript

Laura 0:00

There was a time when keeping up meant keeping up with people down the street. You know, the Joneses. But now anytime anybody hears keeping up, they mean the Kardashians. Keeping up means Instagram and Pinterest. It means moms online with perfect homes, beautiful vacations, color-coded lives, and kids in all the right activities. And if you're not careful, you can spend a whole lot of money trying to build a life that looks good from the outside, while it quietly feels worse and worse on the inside. You are listening to the Money and Legacy Podcast with Laura Sexton. I'm helping families pay off debt, grow wealth, and build a legacy without sacrificing what matters most. This is where money feels easy. Hey, legacy builders. When you hear keeping up, who is it that you are thinking about? Are you thinking about the Joneses, or are you thinking about the Kardashians? This really came to light for me as we are gearing up for this big move. I am looking at houses and rooms and decoration ideas, and I have all the thoughts and all the things, and I have a picture in my mind of what the most beautiful decorated house could be, especially the kitchen and dining room. That's where all of my focus is. I have no idea what my bedroom's gonna look like, but the kitchen and dining room are going to be gorgeous. What I'm finding in my brain is I'm trying to keep up with everybody else and how it looks online and what the professional designers have come up with and created. What I'm finding is it's fantasy. I'm living in a fantasy of what it could be, what it should be, what it might be. What I'm failing to look at is how I want it to feel. How do I want people to feel? Not because of how it's decorated, but because of the people in the home. When we are in the comparison, the keeping up trap, we are missing what's most important. So let's take it back just a second. Comparison used to be limited to the people on your street, at your school, or in your neighborhood. You couldn't compare to people halfway around the world because you had no way of looking into their world. And in some instances, it's wonderful how we are more connected because of social media, but in many ways it's terrible, because now comparison, it's global, it's constant, and it's curated. We're no longer comparing real life to real life. We're no longer comparing pain to pain. We're no longer comparing our actual life to somebody else's actual life. What we are comparing is our actual life, our failures, for lack of a better term, to somebody else's best angles, best moments, best lighting, best vacation, best room reveal, best whatever. We don't ever compare apples to apples. It's never my best to your best. No, no, no, no, no. I go on social media when I'm feeling like a failure, when I feel like I'm falling down, when I just need a break from the chaos that is my life. I just need a break. I just need a minute. Give me some time. That's when I find myself looking on social media. Now, maybe you're like,"No, I never do that. That's never me," and that's wonderful for you, and I'm super excited. And if you could teach me something, happy to learn. Feel free to come on the podcast. Let's chat about it. But when we're comparing our real life to somebody else's highlight reel, we're seeing something online, and our instantaneous thought is that we are behind. And maybe, maybe you should hear this as me just saying this is how I feel, and it may not be how you feel, but this is definitely coming up for me over and over and over again as I look to moving. Right now, my house is chaos. It's boxes everywhere. We have to live out of boxes until we can actually get in the van and drive to Tennessee, or fly, depending on which child's flying and driving in. We do have to get things all the way across the country, and thankfully, my mother's gonna help me fly some of the kids, so I'm not taking all the kids i- in an airplane by myself,'cause that just sounds crazy. But as I'm looking at somebody else's routine, I'm looking at somebody else's house, I get an internal feeling of just ugh. And any moment where I'm feeling that, mm, I have to stop. I have to stop instantaneously and ask my soul why I'm choosing to feel discontent. And usually what I find in that moment of discontentedness is that it's because I'm focusing on me. I'm focusing on me and my lack and, and my problems and what I want. I'm not focusing on my children. I'm not focusing on my God. I'm not focusing on anything else. It's just me, me, me, and that, ooh, that is not a good place to be What I want to be focusing on as I'm looking at these things is will this increase the function of my home? Will getting that thing upset one of my children? Will getting that thing come in place of buying something for a child? Will getting that thing, or whatever it is I'm looking at, is that going to better my family, or is that just going to make me look good? Because if it's all about me, it's the wrong thing. Let's talk about where this hits in real life for some other people,'cause this podcast is not just about me, and I would love for the podcast to be about you. If you have any comments that you'd like to make, I have a short listener survey, literally five, six questions that you can answer. Scroll down in the show notes. I'd love to hear from you. Um, or if you'd like to come on the podcast and ask a question, tell me about your life, please. This is a show for you, and I'd love for it to be by you as well. For some people in the real world, in real life, they're seeing the car that the person over there is driving. They're seeing the clothes that the person over there is wearing. They're seeing somebody else's vacations. They're looking at the beauty. They're looking at the brands. Maybe that's you listening right now, and I wanna tell you something. When you're looking at that car, do you ever notice the person driving it? Are you ever looking at the person behind the wheel? In his book, Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel actually addresses this. He talks about how when we see the flashy car, we always envision ourselves in it. We always say,"Man, I would love to be the guy driving that car," but at no point in time do we pay any attention to the man actually behind the wheel. We are only focused on the car and how we would feel driving it. So whereas we think that people would look at us and see us as so successful, so amazing, how could... You know, that person has that car, that's awesome. They're not looking at you. Having the car is not going to change somebody else's opinion of you that is out in the atmosphere. Somebody would have to look at you and know you, and if they look at you and they know you, is the car actually going to change their opinion of you? Tom Holland, in an interview one time, said,"Hey, man, I don't look at comments online. If you have a problem with me, text me. And if you don't have my number, your opinion doesn't matter." That one hit me. That was so good when I heard him say that. I was like,"Yeah, if you don't have my number, you can't text me. Your opinion of me doesn't matter." Now, that doesn't go for some of you out there that you can, in fact, text me, because a lot of you do have my number, and I'm open and free about giving out my work number so people can call me and connect with me. But I can turn that phone off, and I'm more than happy to. Now, I think it's interesting for some people it is cars, clothes, vacations, that kind of thing. But for me, it's very rarely a flashy spending situation. Where I find myself trying to keep up is often in kids' activities or lifestyle pressure or how the house looks. Obviously, that's top of mind for me right now. What I see a lot is wanting life to feel like what I saw online. But very rarely when I'm trying to compare to what's online, I'm not looking at the person and what their life looks like and what they're going through to get that perfect photo. And I think that we sometimes completely disconnect the things with the people. Must be nice for you, except I have no idea if it's nice for you or not because I haven't taken the time to ask. I haven't taken the time to get to know you. So I'm asking you right now, my, my dear, dear legacy builder friend, are you looking at the people on your street or are you looking at the people on social media and TV? Because sometimes th- this has nothing at all to do about trying to look rich. Sometimes it's about trying to make life look like the picture in your head. And I would much rather you compare the picture, the picture in your head to be developed and, and changed by the people around you in your street as opposed to the people on social media. The thing I'm often surprised by this keeping up trap is that where it hurts our families is very individualized, first of all, just like what we see and what we're looking for in our li- online. And our algorithms feed us what we want, feed us what we focus on. So if you find that there's a lot of negativity, change your algorithm. The best thing you can do is look for cute animal videos, I think. The other day, my daughter was very sick, and we had her in our room, and she was coughing and having trouble breathing, which is just, you know, terrifying when you have a three-year-old that's having any kind of breathing struggle. And we had her in our room, and she just kept crying. And the more you cry, the more mucus is created and the, the harder it is to breathe. So I was just trying to calm her down. So I grabbed my phone. I almost never sit and scroll videos with my kids. Ne- like, never. I hate it. I hate how I feel when I scroll videos, and so I don't wanna share that with them, and I don't wanna reduce their cognitive abilities by letting them watch short videos. But I pulled out my phone, and I started looking for cute animal videos is what I typed in, cute animal videos. And we saw just the cutest baby elephants, baby giraffes, little doggies doing funny things. She loves dogs. We saw goats, and a baby otter, who was just adorable. And now half of my feed is tiny baby animals, and I love it. And I will click on it. I'll look at it over and over again. Why? Because I need a little bit more joy. I don't wanna be comparing all the time. I don't want that discontentment. I want joy, and baby animals bring me joy. So if I am gonna scroll, I'd rather be scrolling, looking at cute little things, as opposed to things that will bring negativity and pressure. But, you know, the world of the ag- algorithm knows that you are more likely to pay attention to the negative, and that's why they push it out there so much. So the, the keeping up trap, where it hurts families the most that I see, the people that come to me, and I'm... We're working on things with their finances, for the most part, the root of it, when we dig down, dig down, dig down, the root of it is discontentment. But discontentment, that's gonna create stress, and stress often creates overspending. Overspending then creates debt, and debt creates pressure. Pressure creates an overcommitted schedule and emotional strain. And when you have overcommitted schedules, where people are not able to connect because we're overcommitting, we're doing all the things, and then we have emotional strain, where we can't connect even if we are together because we're so at, at heightened senses, families start drifting apart, and they start drifting away from who they actually want to be. Keeping up with a picture of somebody else halfway around the world or halfway around the continent, trying to keep up with people that are not in our neighborhood, not in our day-to-day life, that's how we start overspending. That's how we start changing our values. So how do we fix that? Well, we fix that by deciding from day one that we are going to live our values. We don't spend our money based on what feels good. We spend our money based on who we want to be. We make our calendars based on who we want to be, not who we want to impress. One of the ways is this hurts our children. We can put our kids in too many activities, or put them in the wrong activities, or force them into activities that they don't actually enjoy but we need it for the'Gram. Another thing with our kids is we give them too much stuff. This is my family at Christmas. We say we're only going to give them three things, and then they get 30 things, and they don't want it. They don't need it. It's just stuff. But by giving them so much stuff, they have all these things around them, and they're bored. We don't give their brain space to enjoy. And another thing that we do when we are giving them all this stuff and they ask for something and we give it to them right away so we can see their face and we can post it on the Instagram or whatever, kids today don't wait for anything. They don't have to earn anything. We are stealing from them the opportunity to anticipate. And sometimes anticipation's the best part. Have you ever been to a concert that you have bought the tickets months in advance and you're just so excited to go to? Isn't that the best time? Like, you have something, you're looking forward to something, and it's gonna be amazing. That's, that's anticipation, and we're stealing that from our children by just, you know, clicking a button on Amazon and having it delivered in two hours. There's not enough waiting in our lives, and our kids need that. Their brains need that. They don't need an instantaneous answer. They need to learn how to look things up in an encyclopedia. They need the slow simmer of knowledge and wisdom. They don't need just to be fed facts. We are taking waiting away from our kids, and we're giving our kids too many options. Do you know what happens when you have too many options? You don't get to love any of them. You pick just to pick, or you push away because there are too many options and you don't want any of them. Too many options is a failure on your part, Mom. You are allowing them to be confused and overwhelmed because you give them too many options. They need one or two options. They don't need to go look at the whole closet and pick out what's to wear. Give them two options."This one or that one? Do you wanna wear a dress or pants today?" you see, as parents, we often get very frustrated by the problems that we have created. I have a friend who has two children. One of them is a sports star. She's absolutely amazing. She started kicking around a soccer ball at, like, three and has not stopped. Literally, they go anywhere And she finds something that can serve as a soccer ball, and she's kicking it around. She can't help herself. She's just so enamored with the sport, and she's really, really good at it. But she has a little brother who spends all of his time following sister around to all of her tournaments. She's on multiple teams because when you're that good, people want you, and she can do, you know, local, and she can do travel, and she can do... Well, brother was tired of following her around, so brother wanted to get in sports. So now, sister is on multiple different teams doing multiple different leagues, and now brother's playing multiple sports because sister was doing it, so brother had to do it. And so now this family is being pulled in multiple directions, and their children are the center of their family. Their children's activities are the center of their family. Now, right now, no problem. So it's crazy because they wanted both of them to be in sports, and it's wonderful, and right now it's all fine for their family. But they have to be very intentional to make sure that what they are doing continues to keep them connected as a family because what's really sad is when parents start to get frustrated by the problems that they created. The parents have to make the ultimate decision because you're the parent, and sometimes parents forget how, how to parent. A parent is not just a title. It is a job that you need to do. It is a thing that you have to do. A parent is a title. It's also a verb. So let's talk about the marriage angle here of how the keeping up trap can hurt your family. N- the, you can have pressure from multiple different angles here, but debt and money management and money mastery is one of the leading causes of marital fights and disagreements. And some people say,"Well, we're just not gonna talk about it. We'll have our separate accounts, and we'll just not worry about it, and I'll take care of my debts, and he'll take care of his debts." No, friends. That is adding undue burden to both of you where you're living separate lives under one roof. The debt pressure, it can be intense. It can be for one of you more than the other one. There's going to be a security issue by having debt. You're not going to feel secure, and you're going to want to handle something, anything, and you start to get frustrated because the debt is overwhelming And for some of you, overwhelming debt could be$10,000 because you didn't want to have any, and now you have some, and that's irksome to you. And for others of you, you're like me and my husband. You have$372,347 in debt, and you don't have any idea which way's up. But let's talk about what happens when we're keeping up with everybody else, and we're saying yes to everybody except for our family, and our schedule gets under pressure. Well, now I'm going over here and doing this, and you're going over there and doing that, and we're all starting to get really overwhelmed. I have a couple that I'm working with right now, and they were complaining about the fact that they've been on the baseball field six days a week for the last three weeks. Now, I understand pressure because he's trying to start a business, so not only is he going to his 9:00 to 5:00, but he's trying to start a business. And she's working 9:00 to 5:00, and there's pressure at work, and then there's pressure at home, and then there's pressure on the schedule, and there's pressure, pressure, pressure. That leads to less kindness. And the last thing our marriage needs is to not be kind to one another. And all of this is gonna lead to more exhaustion, which, tell me if you're not short with somebody if you're tired or hungry. There's no time to make dinner, so we're going through the drive-through, and now that puts pressure on our wallet because we didn't have the margin to be making that decision. Less margin, less patience. More pressure, less patience. Less patience, a marriage struggles. So you tell me, what good is it to have a home that looks good if it doesn't feel good on the inside? Real quick before we keep going, if you've been listening lately, I want to say thank you. We've had a lot of new listeners around here, and I want to make sure I'm making episodes that actually help you the most. So I put together a super short listener survey. It should take about two minutes, and if you fill it out and leave your name and email, you will be entered to win a$50 gift card. The link is in the show notes, and I would really love your feedback. Why is comparison so emotionally and spiritually expensive? One way that I see it come up for not only me but also for my clients is that it makes your actual life feel smaller than it is. It feels less significant because you're comparing to everybody around you. Comparison can make you feel restless or like you feel behind, so you're trying to run to catch up, and you have to constantly be doing. So maybe, m- maybe you feel restless or maybe you feel like you're not doing enough. Comparison can also make your blessings harder to enjoy. This one really hit home for me. I have the most amazing children, but when I'm comparing them to somebody else's children who are perfect and well-behaved... Like t- this morning at church, there was a lady who had three kids, and two of them were sitting so calmly on the couch while her one-and-a-half-year-old was following her up to the donut counter, and I looked over, and I was like,"Your boys are so well-behaved." And I, in that moment, I was like,"I wish my kids would behave like that at church." And she just laughed at me, and she goes,"Oh, a second ago they were wrestling and almost knocked somebody over." And I was like,"Oh, okay. I feel less bad now." I love my kids, and I love how happy they are, and I love that we're at a church that celebrates young life and the next generation of believers. It's amazing, but I don't want my blessings, my children, to be harder to enjoy. I don't want my other blessings to be hard to enjoy. Right now, we live in a very cozy place. This place has been where I've brought four of my five children home. All five of my kids have learned to walk here. I love where we're at, but when I compare it to where my friends live, I can get very discontent. But when I'm here, when I'm looking around, when I'm enjoying what's right in front of my face, I see it as the blessing that it is. And I know we're moving to a house. When I compare where I'm at right now to the house that I'm moving into, it is three times the size. There are three times the number of bathrooms. I am so excited for that blessing that the Lord has given to us. But my goodness, it is hard to enjoy this blessing right here but when I'm comparing it to even where we're moving to, it's hard to enjoy this blessing right in front of me. Comparison is emotionally and spiritually expensive because it pushes you to do more, to buy more, to prove more. It steals your peace without you ever being satisfied. Discontentment is expensive. Discontentment will make you spend money, spend time, and spend energy trying to become somebody else, and you were made to be exactly who you are. God didn't make you to be somebody else. He made that person to be that person. God made you to be exactly who you are, and you need to embrace that And love that and find joy in that. So what should you do the next time you notice comparison creeping in? Well, first of all, go ahead and turn off social media. You don't need it. If something happens in the world, your mom will call you and tell you, I promise. Turn it off. Stop looking at the news. Stop looking at anything at all that stirs up an attitude of comparison within you. Anytime you're looking at something, you're like,"Oh, I wish that I had that," or,"I wish I was doing that," or,"I wish our kids were like that." No, no, no, no, no, no, no. If you're looking at it and going,"I wish that..." Turn it off. Stop looking at it. Move on. Touch grass, as the kids say. Go outside. Look at the world around you. Notice what is constantly making you discontent, and then disconnect from that, even if it's people in your life. If you are at work and somebody comes up to you and they're constantly going,"I hate being here. This place is the worst. Did you hear about Sue Bob over in accounting? She messed this up again." And if they're constantly complaining, disconnect from them. The next time they come up to you at work and they are complaining, just say,"Hey, you know what? I actually, I, I appreciate that you're coming and telling me that, but, have you, have you talked to them about that?" I promise you bring it up to them, and you're like,"Hey, I'm gonna cut off the gossip," right? Or they come up to you and they're like,"Ah, the water is, you know, they ran out of water in the water cooler again." You can go,"Hey, well, did you talk to facilities about that? I can't do anything about it, but maybe I can give you the number of somebody that can." They'll stop coming to you. And if you let the people that are constantly nagging and bringing things down, if you let them go, you disconnect from them, I promise you, you are going to feel better at work. You have to reduce your exposure to things if that is taking away your joy. You need to protect your peace. If looking at something makes you constantly discontent, maybe you don't need more discipline. Maybe you just need less exposure to that thing. A better alternative when you feel this discontentment, you need to find a better alternative, is first of all, to define your family values. Decide who you want to be and what kind of home you want to build, and then you orient everything around that. Not around what you're seeing somebody else do, not around what you're seeing on social media, not around anything else in the world, only around your family, your values, and what kind of home you wanna build. When you decide what peace looks like, what joy looks like, what calm and alignment looks like for your family, I want you to go ahead and revisit those values often. Use them to guide your spending, your schedules, your activities, your priorities, even the aesthetics of your home. This is something that you want to sit down and define more clearly with your spouse. This is something that I want to sit down and define more clearly with my spouse. It's something we've been working on, like what are our family values, what is most important, what is least important. Your values should be spoken out loud and not assumed. Because if you know your values, you're less likely to be led around by everybody else's life. This is also why we write our spending plan down on paper. Because when we know what our decision to spend our money has been, we already made the decision, we just follow it. It's the same way with your children. If you're going to have teenagers, and if, I mean, I'm going to have five one day, I need them to decide whether or not they're going to sleep with their boyfriend or girlfriend before they get in the back seat. We have to make these decisions ahead of time, not in the moment. We need to keep up with ourselves in the life that we are creating and not what everybody else is doing. Success is not going to look impressive, but it will look aligned. It's not curated for strangers, but it's a calm and joyful home. One of my favorite things about my best friends is that I don't have to clean up for them to come over because I don't care what their house looks like. They don't care what my house looks like. We care about being together. Success looks like friendship. It looks like a calm, joyful home. It looks like kids that aren't crushed by pressure. A marriage that has margin, breathing room. And a home that feels good on the inside. Doesn't matter what it looks like. Are you building a life your family actually enjoys living in, or are you building one that just looks good from the outside? Oh, friends, thank you for being with me today. I hope that the keeping up is not something that you struggle with day to day. If you know somebody that tends to have a keeping up attitude, let's go ahead and send this episode to them. Let's share it with them. I know that you guys are sharing the episodes because my numbers are going up, and I'm terrible at sharing the podcast. So if you wouldn't mind sending this to a friend, I would really appreciate it. But most importantly, if this episode hit home and you're realizing that you may be building around pressure, comparison, or somebody else's values instead of your own, that's exactly what a clarity call is for. This is a free call where we sit down, look at what's going on, and help you get clarity on your next right steps. And if there's a way I can support you further, we can talk about that too. But either way, you walk away with more clarity than you came in with. The link is down in the show notes. You click on the button where it says,"Become a master with your money. Learn more here." Click learn more here. You want to master your money. That is what you want, and we will get you scheduled for that clarity call. Or you can go on my website accelerateyourlegacy.com/claritycall. That is it for this week, Legacy Builders. I hope that you are having the best of Mays and that you are enjoying time with your family. I'll talk to you again next week. Go out and make a difference