Makes sense. A depressed person, sitting inside, looking through the window at their friends playing outside, I guess would feel more depressed.
Social media is for presenting the highlights of your life. For a lot of depressed or even just gullible people it is easy to generalize from that. I have acquaintances who blew up their personal lives in a search for that elusive "perfect life".
Is this in the typical sense of spending beyond their means, or do you have other anecdotes?
I am a highly compensated tech worker at a FAANG who overcame US immigration and other challenges to get here, and many people would trade their spot with mine.
Yet, I am so unhappy and burned out by work that I don’t think about anything else than quitting and moving back to my parents’ countryside house and enjoying a life of peace and quiet with the savings I have amassed, with no work pressure and rat race, just long hikes in nature, naps, reading and programming for fun.
I changed roles and companies and the feeling never went away. I think in January I’ll finally start therapy, I’ve been unhappy for so long that I’m worried this might just be “my ride” for the rest of my life, if I don’t do something about it.
Despite this unhappiness, I’ve never been able to quit because of that inner voice: “are you out of your stupid mind?! You’re just 35 and are making 7 figures, stop whining you privileged fool and make hay while it lasts, people would risk their physical safety in a mine for that salary”.
I’m wondering if this voice is the voice of reason while my wants are just another instance of “blowing up my life” because I see how happy other people are.
As to the voice in your head and the wants you're identifying, it sounds like you don't necessarily want to quit, or that you even want an idyllic rustic lifestyle. But more so that you wanna address where the feeling of being burnt-out and stuck is coming from. Like... I'm just a rando/ stranger from the internet, so take what I say with a grain of salt (and why a counselor will be way better to talk to than me and others here on this forum), but it seems like you want escape/ relief from your current life (in the form of just feeling peace that kinda looks like spending time outdoors), but there's a real pressure and possibly fear of feeling like if you seek this kinda peace, you are sabotaging yourself in the form of undoing all that you worked hard for, which translates to money, career, etc.
Just to give some perspective, it's possible to have a career while having a deep, settled feeling of peace in the core of who you are. This isn't easy. And it won't look the same for everyone. But it doesn't necessarily have to be an either-or thing.
But I get the sense it's going to be a longer journey – if not life-long in some sense – to find and maintain this sense of deep peace. It's not necessarily like a pill you pop or a light switch you turn on that changes everything in an instant, but a slow discovery that dawns upon you. I don't mean to sound so woo-woo, but just wanted to provide some perspective.
I’ve been basically living all my adult life like a frugal college student so that I could amass millions of dollars to get out of the rat race. However, it seems like the burnout is getting so bad that I might not be able to continue with this accumulation strategy.
At the core of it is (1) my inability to effectively deal with work pressure (2) a strong sense of impostor syndrome, which FAANG makes it even worse (3) my extremely introvert personality, being in a senior technical position at work I have to constantly interact with other people and I hate every minute of it, despite still doing it.
My ideal life is one where I have enough passive income to keep me afloat in perpetuity (working on it), and spend my time trying to build low-pressure solo online businesses that allow me to cultivate programming at my own pace without having to talk to other people except my family. Even just writing it out sounds idyllic.
On the other hand, perhaps living such a frugal lifestyle is contributing to your burnout. Not suggesting you need to throw all caution to the wind but taking some vacations/travels, or working with an interior designer to have a really nice welcoming place to come home to could make a difference.
After a few years of "drifting", failing to find anything close to what they had before, I lost contact with those people so not sure where they ended up. I sometimes stumble on the blog of one of them and it looks like they're still searching, years and years later.
So in some sense this was worse than spending too much. Money is fungible and you can make it up eventually, particularly if you have good people around you. Good people are not fungible and getting them back is a lot harder, sometimes next to impossible.
Plenty of people are in long term relationships they can't stand for way too long, or careers, etc. I'm sure social media often plays a role but some relationships / jobs are just bad regardless of whether or not the grass is Instagram Green or not.
I'm sure social media can create, maintain, or accentuate a lot of different types of "pathologies" because it was designed to do so.
Social media is just pure individualistic ego-stroking by comparison. The message is “my life is better than yours”.