# I feel pathetic



## Lelsey

I hate myself so much for feeling this way.. but can't stop myself. I feel pathetic for being jealous of all my friends. I want to train myself to look at things that i have, not things that other people appear to have. But it's so hard.

I grew up being the "good and well-mannered kid" according to most of the adults. I was proper, i never cursed, i listened to my parents and never fought back, i did not smoke, never do drugs or anything remotely close,. I did well in school, I went to gifted school, got a scholarship and went overseas for my degree. 

And yet now things turned so wrong, i am feeling like a loser every single day. All the people know, my classmates are much more successful than me when it comes to their career and even relationship. I keep hearing them having their own companies, finishing their Phd, getting awards, buying new houses, getting married, having kids, sending their kids to international schools, etc. And every single time this ugly feeling surfaces again, making me hating myself even more. I even got jealous of people going to friend's gathering. I have none of those, no boyfriend, no friend even, no husband, no family, no house, no company. I hate this so much, when did i go so wrong. I probably did something to earn me this and i want to know what i did.. i want to fix this.. i am so afraid there will come a day when i can't take it anymore and did something stupid..


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## cavemanslaststand

Don't know if this helps, but try your best to not compare yourself with others.

An 80 year-old Norwegian former farmer for whom I was assigned to do house chores for a youth community service program observed how I felt frustrated about being on welfare and having to consistently help take care of invalid parents then at age 10 and for the rest of my inconceivable life while I was envious of other children going on family vacations, movies, and doing fun things with their time.

The farmer was staring down dealth and gave me a word of advice: If you moderate what you want and wish for, you will remember that doctors, lawyers, movie stars, and millionaires, in the end they are returned to earth with their fleeting joys just like anyone else. He also told me how he had no children of his own as he and his wife met and married late (in their mid 40s) as he had to spend most of his life taking caring of his parents and his only older brother lived fast and died young in his late 20s, so he had to take care of his brother's five children left behind too.

Beginning to lose focus on where this is going, but basically we are all staring down what looks like the end, 3-Oh half of 6-Oh, 4-Oh half of 8-Oh, and 5-Oh half of Oh-Oh, Oh-No.

At some point we just need to stop focusing on we have fallen behind and just work toward simple joys in our lives. Despite X-Y-Z totally sucking in my life, I can still do A-B-C to aquire a good meal and spend my time watching Cosmic Journeys to remember how temporary everything is.


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## Biggles

Caveman's right.

And Facebook and Twitter don't help these days because everyone is promoting themselves all the time. Then all the celebrity culture tells us what we should have. But success is not "who dies with the most toys wins", success is enjoying all the small things in life, being ourselves, living to our own values. Don't make the mistake of thinking that those people with companies and houses and PhDs must be happier than you. They want you and everyone else to think they are, but there is a lot of misery and suffering among "successful" people. ANd many of them don't get to enjoy simple things in life because they're too busy keeping it all together, and making the next $.

Someone who makes $10,000 a year envies someone who makes $100,000 a year and feels like he/she does not have enough. But that person who makes $100,000 a year knows people who make $1,000,000 and feels like he doesn't have enough. Is that millionaire happy? No, he knows multi-millionaires who have a bigger mansion and nicer toys than him. WHen you buy into that thinking that society promotes, you will ALWAYS feel like you are "less than".

Focus on feeling good about yourself from within, not from without.


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## stevieoo

*Hi*

i never compare my self to others but when others compre there self to me then i get in to that mode and i dont like it at all i dont like compareing my self.i never crave anything anyone wants.i only wanted wat i want.but in this world it seem to ba a very commen thing to crave for others possion's.i would say hey that's a ncie car are i like thos shoes but i ahve never crave anything to treat them bad.i would say hey i want a pair of thos but would't say anything bad about it.i try to be netural with things i like and other people like not trying to root them cause they got a very nice car are shoes are house.i would love someone with a good personality and yet i never found anyone close to the personality i have i have a good and honest and kindhearted personality.cause that really matters.


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## toxqan

I thoroughly sympathesize with your feeling. A profound status anxiety occasionally mixes with the social version to form a potent cocktail for me as well.

In taking a step back, I think there are two things you should consider. One is the already mentioned point that at least some of your feeling derives from the perception of others' success. I have personally found that various highfalutin titles listed on someone's LinkedIn profile or resume probably vastly overstate their responsibilities. What you hear about someone's family life is filtered through others' perceptions. Others believe it sometimes but this type of information should always be taken with a grain of salt. Of course, there is no way of knowing how happy someone is with family life. Their kids could all be the spawn of satan after all.  They could be happy too, but its probably not worth your time to research.

The second is that your standard is set almost impossibly high. If founding one's own company or finishing a doctorate is the stardard, then what is considered good? acceptable? failing? If that is the standard, you must socialize with extremely exclusive company. And even if that is the case, I imagine you have plenty of time to achieve these goals if you set your mind to them. Accomplishing any of the things you mention would be equally laudable if done in twenty years time. Most people will never even consider attempting these things. (There's also nothing that says having a phd guarantees you a succesful job or that your high flying start up won't crash and burn, or that you won't regret having a bunch of kids)

I suck at taking my own advice, but in my best moments I have learned to immerse myself completely in what it is that I do that makes me happy and satisfied. I then start to forget about having social anxiety or being depressed. That could be something very minor or part of something larger but its waste of time to compare your life with someone else's because it can't be done objectively.


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## The Sum of Awe

When i get a situation like that, i always think back to what i was told as a kid: "life is like a bridge that we're constantly moving forward on. it's best to not build a castle as you'll soon move on"


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## cavemanslaststand

I think BiggleTechnologies, MedToxGandalf, and SummationOfAwesomes bring up great points and excellent questions of what we define as success and happiness.

Like BiggleTech alluded to, we do get inundated by lifestyles of the brutally rich and bloody narcissictic which portray them having the ability to do bored things with their time while we struggle to pay our fukning bills and struggle to get anyone to give a flippin' hamburger about us with our sub-prime cuts of food. "Friends" on FB with photo-ops also present a glee-ful existence too.

Furthermore, the year after year WIN at all cost messages from Wide World of BRAT Sports including one dude who overcame cancer to WIN at all cost and not to mention various high school "loud and proud" prep sports boostering.

This leaves us poor, quiet, disinterested, and rejected folk in our agoraphobic existence meditation huts to ponder how many more endangered animals [those little critters don't stand a chance per David Attenborough ] will be taken out by the loud and proud selfish narcissists and profit driven land-hoarding castle mongering folk trying to be more successful spreading their genetics.

END RANT. Carry on and ignore.


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## HeartofDarkness

I can certainly identify with how the OP feels. I’m sure I’m in a worse situation than she is. But one thing I never do is compare my success to others. Society does that for me. Whenever someone learns that I’m 34, and still don’t have my life together (living in my parents house), I get judged negatively for it. That’s more than enough for me to bear.

If I compared myself to my other friends, siblings, and relatives that were way more successful than me in life I’d drive myself crazy. I can only be concerned about myself. I’m proud of all those I know that have had such a better life than I have. The only thing that keeps me going is the faith that one day (hopefully while I’m still young enough to enjoy it) I’ll be able to join them in the pride of having some of the things that they all have and we all aspire to.


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## ToucanSam

Biggles said:


> Facebook and Twitter don't help these days because everyone is promoting themselves all the time...Focus on feeling good about yourself from within, not from without.


lol! very well said!
but that last part is easier said than done; we live in a competitive society which instills us with the urge to keep up with the Jones's, and condemns us if we fail.



cavemanslaststand said:


> This leaves us poor, quiet, disinterested, and rejected folk in our agoraphobic existence meditation huts to ponder how many more endangered animals [those little critters don't stand a chance per David Attenborough] will be taken out by the loud and proud selfish narcissists and profit driven land-hoarding castle mongering folk trying to be more successful spreading their genetics.
> 
> END RANT. Carry on and ignore.


as rants go, that is a right merry one. I salute it, not ignore it.


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