Maybe, You Are Where You Were Meant To Be
Have you ever caught yourself wanting to trade places with someone else? I have. The trouble is that their life might not actually fit you. Between the internet, reality TV, newspapers, and magazines, we end up learning far more about the people we once admired than is good for us. Fame and possessions don't deliver happiness, and plenty of those people haven't figured that out yet.
Envy and jealousy quietly chew through whatever contentment you have. The message all around us is to stay hungry, to never settle for what we already own, to resist any sense of gratitude. Gratitude, though, is where the real satisfaction lives. A lot of people who climbed high eventually look back and see that they accumulated money, recognition, and things without ever carving out time to enjoy any of it. They stayed busy chasing more, and some discovered too late that they weren't really building a life for themselves. They were serving everyone who had come to lean on them.
Think about the people around you. Do you pick your friends and the ones who admire you, or do they come looking for you? And what are they after? Certain hangers-on count on you having weak judgment, figuring you'll pull them along and quietly carry their weight. I once envied a well-known psychic. She charges a steep fee for her readings, and she seems almost unable to stop: funding her own church, pushing out one new book after another, keeping a schedule of appearances that would wear anyone down. She has reached an age where she ought to slow down and enjoy the view. Watching her more closely cured me of the envy.
We are trained from early on to put other people on pedestals, sometimes to the point of worship, and we're told to shape ourselves in their image. These days we tend to call them teachers or mentors instead. But everyone carries flaws, and the people we think of as closest to saints have been the first to say so. Mother Teresa understood that she wasn't perfect and that her days weren't perfect either. Jesus himself, on the cross, asked his Father to take the cup away from him. You don't have to be religious to see the point: the most famous, most powerful, wealthiest, most influential people still can't always have what they want or live the way they'd choose, and there's nothing they can do to change that.
One of the great joys available to a person is getting to spend your days doing work you love, ideally earning enough to keep doing it, surrounded by people who are genuinely in your corner, with a way of seeing life that lets you keep going. There is no single version that works for everybody. Wear your own shoes. You've already broken them in.