Looked up my old classmates and i really shouldn't have

So I was having a really rough morning and having a particularly rough spiraling session when I decided to look up my old classmates from school. I regret doing so. I'm shocked at how much better everyone is doing than me. When I was doing badly in high school, I always tried to focus on the future and think that college would be better for me. That time never came because I was too broke to go to college. And now I get to see everyone living their best lives and having the college experience while I sit here and rot. I'm already 3 years into my 20s and I haven't don't anything with my life. All I do is bedrot all day. I have no one to blame for this but myself. While everyone was applying and going to college, I was home ruminating about high school instead of trying to move on. Even at 18 I felt too old and now when actually starting to get too old I'm as behind as I've ever been.

I have so much to fix in my life I don't even know where to begin. My social skills are so bad because I never had friends. I have no other skills to speak of and I'm struggling to find a job. Meanwhile, people I went to school with are going to college and getting their bachelors and masters and thriving generally. Meanwhile, I'm stuck in life and I've never even been in love. Even if I do go to college, ill be in my mid 20s and it will be too late to have the "college experience" by then. Not that that's the only thing that matters. I was sheltered all my childhood and I never got a chance to be a person away from my family. What other prople do at 18-20 I'll be doing in my mid 20s and this isn't where I want to be at all.

I wish I could go back to being 16 with the knowledge I have now but it's too late. I have to accept where I am in life and I just can't. I don't know how to move forward and I don't even want to. I know envy is bad but the only reason I feel it so strongly is because what has come easy for other people my whole life has never come easy for me. And now I'm home stalking people from my past while they probably don't even think of me. I feel like giving up on everything because there's no point trying to catch up when you're this behind already.

mimi000 said:

there's no point trying to catch up when you're this behind already.

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Unless you come at it from the other direction. Life expectancy is somewhere in the mid-80s. Working life ahead of you is, what, another 50 years?

That’s a looooong time to spend in no-point-trying territory. You don’t have to figure it out today. You could wallow for another 10 years and STILL have plenty of time to live your best life.

There’s people who life is going great for. There will always be people like that. The older you get, though, the smaller that minority gets. Suffering is everywhere.

If envy is keeping you stagnant, consider spending time focusing on the other direction. Head to a soup kitchen once a week to help out, something like that, to help focus your perspective about what you really value, what you want out of your life, and the motivation that the screen is robbing you of.

You have found the ultimate place (social media I assume?) to confirm your cognitive distortions: everyone is doing so much better than me.

Firstly, social media is a pack of lies.
Even if every single person you went to school with is in college (which I doubt.....), you have no idea if they are struggling with drink or drug problems, or mental health issues, or in an abusive relationship, or or or or or. You don't know their struggles and it's false to think that life is great for every one of them.

Do try thought stopping.
What can you tell yourself that is the opposite of what you are currently telling yourself?
What would you tell someone who is doing what you are doing?

The only way things change is by us changing them. And it doesn't just switch overnight. It is tiny steps forward, then back, then forward. But bit by bit, with your hard work, you can change your mind set. And then change your life.

First off, I'm really sorry you're struggling. But let me just say 2 things.
One, I'm 37 and spend a lot of the last decade feeling like this and got to my lowest point in 2024. I had gone to college and had the college experience, I just messed up a lot after and ended up beyond broke and in debt and having to lose apartment, relationship, and a whole lot more and move to family's couch with no income and too depressed to move.
In life there is always lower you can go even when you don't have what you think you should.
23-24- still very young.

I'm not saying 37 is old. I actually have been working hard to start turning life around for myself. Change started to come when I stopped focusing on all I lost and on fixing it in a month and focused on week to week tiny improvements. And I'm really talking tiny. And also, for nearly a year I was off social media and a little isolated in person too. And I needed that to stop hyperfocusing on everything I didn't have. Just hyperfocused on making 1-2 stable changes week to week and also usually 1-2 joys(things to obsess over if I started to spiral, even uf it was passing a level in a free phone game). Because when you're really low looking at what you think is the bigger picture can just dig you deeper.

Yes, likely if you go to college you won't have the 18year old college experience. But you can have a better one. When I was in college we had one guy that was 35. I'm not sure how he related to us, but I know he did well in classes and was partying harder than I ever did and everyone knew him. 23 isn't bad at all. You can do so many wonderful things and catch up in ways you don't realize, you just have to decide to focus on yourself and what you want your next 10 years to be about. No wrong answers.

And yes, please don't base all this on social media. While it can look that way.
Specifically I can say for sure I had a friend I met when I was abroad. We lost touch for a bit and I had super hard time keeping in touch with anyone. Now what he saw at the time was pics of me at parties having a good time- but not having time to write him. But it was uni, and parties happened every night and I had a decent group of friends. Most pictures were taken by someone else and most pictures were holding me to keep going. Because while I loved uni, the first 2 years I was still super anxious and depressed because once I was 'free' as I had wanted, everything I hadn't dealt with was put in perspective through meeting so many other people and having classes and I struggled a lot. But of course I didn't post that. And by the way at that point I could barely talk about it with friends and thought mental health issues were abnormal so of course I would not share that. So yeah, just because you have pretty pictures doesn't mean you have it altogether.

I hope any of this helps and if it doesn't I'm sorry. But I promise you you have plenty of time to build a life you love. Anyone does, however late in life, I do too and I plan to get there, if slower. But at 23- you have soo much more time. I promise.

Everyone is on a different road. Yours looking different does NOT mean you are behind. You're doing good, deep work. Being frozen with anxiety (not going to a college or future you wanted out of anxiety) and having to work through that now, including grieving what secretly could have been if you had just somehow gone anyway, is a lot. It's invisible work, but you're doing it.

It's changed you and given you a different perspective, and it will continue to change and you will get new perspectives.

Dont be so hard on yourself. We're all struggling and suffering. You're doing great.