The La Jolla Version of Keeping Up With the Joneses

When Being Surrounded by Success Quietly Changes What Feels Like Enough

There's a particular kind of beauty to life in La Jolla. The ocean is never far away, the homes can be extraordinary, and many of the people who live here have worked incredibly hard to create successful careers, financial security, and lives they genuinely enjoy.

There's nothing inherently wrong with any of that. Financial success can create freedom. A beautiful home can bring enormous pleasure. Being around ambitious and accomplished people can even inspire us to imagine possibilities for our own lives.

But something interesting can happen when exceptional lives surround us.

Exceptional can start to feel normal.

And what once felt like enough can quietly begin to feel like falling behind.

When Our Reference Point Changes
Comparison is part of being human. We naturally look to other people for information about how we're doing and where we belong.

Usually, we don't consciously decide who's going to become our reference point.

If many of the people around you have significant wealth, beautiful homes, impressive careers, or children attending highly regarded schools, those things can gradually become part of what a successful life is supposed to look like.

Nothing about your actual circumstances has necessarily changed.

The reference point has.

Something you once dreamed about can begin to feel ordinary because you're now comparing it with what's immediately around you.

That's one reason satisfaction can be surprisingly difficult to hold onto. We reach something that once mattered enormously, enjoy it for a while, and then discover there's another level available.

What Success Has Come to Mean
It would be easy to reduce all of this to status or materialism. I don't think that's particularly helpful.

What looks like status from the outside can mean something very different to the person pursuing it.

Maybe financial security matters because you remember what it was like not to have it. Achievement might have helped you feel respected or capable. A beautiful home could represent years of work and the freedom to finally create the environment you wanted.

Success can become connected to safety, belonging, independence, competence, or being able to care for people we love.

That's worth understanding before deciding we should simply care less.

Instead, we might become curious:

What has success made possible for me?

And then:

What am I still hoping it will give me?
​
The answers don't need to be the same.

When Other People's Lives Become Evidence About Ours
Social media gives comparison an almost endless supply of material, but in La Jolla you don't necessarily have to open your phone to encounter it.

Visible wealth and beauty can simply be part of everyday life.

The difficulty is that we know our own lives from the inside and other people's mostly from the outside.

We know our worries, arguments, disappointments, financial concerns, insecurities, and moments when we aren't sure what we're doing. We don't necessarily know any of that about the person whose life we're comparing ours with.

And still, their outside can become evidence about how well we think we're doing.

Rather than trying to stop comparing, notice what happens the next time you do.

Who caught your attention?

And what did their life suddenly seem to say about yours?

Sometimes that small moment tells us much more than another reminder that social media isn't reality.

The Moving Target of Enough
There might have been a time when earning a particular amount of money represented security. Then you reached it, and another number began to feel important.

Maybe owning a home once seemed extraordinary. Eventually the neighborhood, size, view, or renovation became part of how you evaluated it.

This doesn't mean you're ungrateful.

We get used to things.

The extraordinary becomes familiar, and familiarity changes how strongly we experience what we once wanted so badly.

The problem isn't enjoying beautiful things. It's when those things are given the nearly impossible job of making us feel permanently secure in our worth.

If being enough depends on remaining impressive, there's very little opportunity to arrive. Someone will always have something we don't.

When Our Children Enter the Comparison
For parents, comparison can become especially complicated because it doesn't necessarily stop with our own lives.

The schools children attend, what they're good at, where they go to college, and how successfully they seem to be navigating life can become part of the same environment of comparison.

Much of this can begin with love. You want your children to have opportunities and become capable of building lives that feel meaningful to them.

But love and anxiety can sometimes travel together.

When you're surrounded by families investing enormous resources in their children, it can become harder to tell the difference between offering something because it genuinely fits your child and doing it because you're afraid they'll be left behind.

One question might help slow that moment down:

What does my child actually need from me right now?

Not what everyone else's child is doing. Not what will look impressive later.
​
This child, right now.

Success Without Constant Evaluation
There is a difference between enjoying success and needing success to continually reassure us about who we are.

From the outside, the two might look exactly the same.

You can still want the beautiful home. You can still pursue an ambitious career. You can enjoy excellent restaurants, travel, fitness, beautiful clothes, or whatever else genuinely brings pleasure to your life.

The question isn't whether you're allowed to want those things.

It's whether you can enjoy having them without continually using them to measure yourself.
That distinction can be subtle.

Sometimes we only notice it when somebody else gets something we want.

If their success makes yours suddenly feel smaller, there might be something worth getting curious about.

Rediscovering Your Own Definition of Enough
One of the challenges of living around highly accomplished people is that we can inherit definitions of a good life without realizing it.

So instead of asking whether you should want more or learn to be satisfied with less, try something different.

Imagine for a moment that nobody you knew would ever find out about the next major decision you make.

They wouldn't know what you bought, what you earned, where you traveled, what you accomplished, or whether they should be impressed.

Would you still want the same thing?

Maybe the answer is absolutely yes.

That's useful information too.

The point isn't to expose our desires as somehow false. It's to get a little closer to knowing which ones actually belong to us.

Your definition of enough might include substantial achievement, wealth, beauty, and comfort. It might also include relationships, time, creativity, rest, contribution, or simply having enough room in your life to experience what you've worked so hard to create.

You get to decide.

Letting a Beautiful Life Be Beautiful
There's something sad about spending years building a life we wanted and becoming so accustomed to evaluating it that we have trouble experiencing it.

The view becomes the backdrop. The accomplishment becomes yesterday's accomplishment. The home becomes the next project.

Soon we're looking toward whatever comes next.

Maybe the alternative isn't wanting less. It might be becoming more conscious of why we want what we want, and noticing when comparison begins making decisions for us.

You can admire somebody else's success without turning it into evidence that you're behind. You can appreciate beautiful things without asking them to establish your worth. You can remain ambitious without requiring every accomplishment to reassure you that you matter.

La Jolla can still be beautiful.

Your ambitions can still matter.

And the life you've worked hard to create can be something you actually get to live inside rather than continually measure.

Therapy Can Help Us Get Curious About What Enough Means
If comparison, achievement, or lifestyle expectations have begun shaping how you feel about yourself, therapy can give us a place to slow that process down.

We might become curious about what success has come to mean to you, what it's genuinely given you, and where it might have taken on responsibilities it can't completely fulfill. My approach incorporates mindfulness, self-compassion, and experiential ways of working that can help us notice these patterns as they're happening, not just understand them intellectually.

The goal isn't to make you less ambitious or convince you that material things shouldn't matter. It's to give you more freedom to decide what matters to you.
​
When we spend less time looking sideways, we have more room to notice whether the life we're living actually feels like our own.

Schedule Appointment