Thanks for your response Anita. I am in a much better head space today, for some reason I was very moody yesterday. I get what you are saying though my point still stands. All of those examples make sense and my answer to my own original question to them is you can’t compare youreself to others as situations are different.

However the more similarities between two people in the past the more opportunity there is for jealousy to develop. My friend and I were very similar and almost due to a coin flip he now has everything I wanted. Specifically a job he loves that is stable and challenging with chances of progression. He gets to tell people hes worked on final fantasy XV and Battlefield 3 and call fo duty and people are genuinely interested and he works with likeminded people. I on the other hand am bored most days and have a dull lifeles job with no progression and way too much workplace drama for my taste. And I am simply not qualified to do anything else nor is there anything I wanted and even if I did you need so many qualifications these days I simply cannot afford education.

We were once so similar but now he has spent 5 years or more becoming even more capable in his field and I have had to struggle to keep my head above ground. I could argue that due to luck (though not luck alone, I am not saying he isn’t skilled just that by comparison to myself we had the same chance and he got lucky) he got his chance and it worked out but that doesn’t mean hes any better than me but 5 years of professional work on AAA projects makes him unstoppable and certainly better than me now. He could get a job at most studios (and gets headhunted occasionally) and I couldn’t even get a junior role now. He has a better life than me, it’s that simple. His future has more prospects than mine by far and he is living his dream. I am sure he has other ideas but when he sees me on facebook I’m sure he has no interest in connecting and doesn’t feel much other than pity whereas I am consumed by envy when I see him.

How do I get over this? The facts are quite irrifutable his lot is better than mine. If I had another ambission I could move on but I simply don’t and not for lack of looking. I am not jealous of other peoples success I am jealous of this one guy because had a couple of things gone differently that could have been me.

I don’t focus on this day to day, just that when the mood strikes I get very emotional over it. I feel like I have been dropped on the heap, like my best times are behind me and now I have 30+ years of dead end drudgery ahead. It’s not event hat I begrudge him his life, just that what he has highlights what I don’t have and knowing how easily it could have been me it just eats me up inside.

It sounds silly to say but it’s like I have this weight that I drag around with me that if I could shrug it off I could move onwards towards a better future. But at the same time holding onto this weight is what is keeping me from finding a new future.

I may start a new thread on this actually as after writing this I think perhaps I need to let go of my past, maybe this is the weight I feel not neccessarily jealousy. I feel like a part of me is dead and perhaps my jealousy is that my friends dream is still alive but mine is dead. Maybe. I think the big thing that makes this worse is that not only was I made redundant, there are no jobs in my field anywhere close so I am mixing redundancy with a career change. Not to mention that I have no desires to do anything anymore, so when I should be working hard to change things I can’t even decide on a direction and at times I don’t even want to get out of bed.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Ben.