Birds of a feather flock together. The truth of this old adage never hit me until my late twenties by which time I had changed places and jobs a few times. Growing up with an ill defined idea of who a friend was, I imagined I would have friends of all kinds around me who would challenge my thinking and perceptions by simply being who they are. Like some carefully assembled bouquet of exotic flowers I thought I would, of course, have a hippie friend, a nerd friend, a gothic friend, whatever, but over the years I learnt that the people I like talking to and the people whose company and conversations I enjoyed were almost exclusively a subset of the people I went to university (and later, graduate school) with. I found that people I knew from an earlier period in my life, like a neighbor or a high school friend, came to see me as being different because of the wildly different path I had taken later in life. I would like to imagine that close friends from a young age don't just fade away because you went to a different school or took a different job, but that's how it has played out consistently in my life. In brief encounters with such friends I learnt that they treated me differently and were too eager to put me down, either out of some deep insecurities, afraid of who I was or simply from an effortless nastiness that came to them. I think this (late twenties) is a time when some people become acutely perceptive of keeping score and start playing the status game etc. I uniformly avoid such idiots from my social life, when I just want to hang out without the specter of my career looming over every conversation.
Unfortunately, I seem to have had a similar experience. Perhaps it is bound to happen in this economy when a lot of people are struggling to find decent jobs on the one hand, and you have this group of people involved with Tech who are doing incredibly well...I've made the decision to always live with roommates not in the tech sector, and I made the mistake of revealing once how much I make. Instantly, my roommate's (and his friends') attitude changed after that. I've learned to never make that mistake again.
I am not him but in my case my friends and roommates say things like "You make enough to pay for this/that/whatever", "Why would you look for another job you make good money?" etc.
I do make good money for this area or compared to them but that doesn't mean I don't have to be responsible with it.
I think this (late twenties) is a time when some people
become acutely perceptive of keeping score and start playing
the status game etc
This is a weird thing I've noticed of friends who I now consider as lost to an abyss of work-is-life obsession.
I get that work and progress is enjoyable, and time seems valuable when you have a full time job but it's quiet sad to see people disappear into workaholicism.
I stopped one of my hobbies abruptly 3-4 months ago. I realized how quickly my value and purpose became interconnected with work. I think people end up in work-is-life rut because they don't have other things to occupy their time / brain when they are home so they tend to think about work all the time which makes them talk about work which makes them work and so on.
Just started back up with my old hobby and I feel almost immediately better about everything and I think its mainly because I have something else to focus time thinking about and my life feels less singular.
"I thought I would, of course, have a hippie friend, a nerd friend, a gothic friend, whatever, but over the years I learnt that the people I like talking to and the people whose company and conversations I enjoyed were almost exclusively a subset of the people I went to university (and later, graduate school) with."
I was having a large diversity of "friends" before university and I do now have only a narrow subset of people I went through the university that I'm still getting along with, but I think I'm looking at it very differently than you. I haven't had much of a choice before but to deal in an as much graceful manner I could with all that zoo before, and that become like a second nature to me. They called me a friend. It was an easy thing to do for me as well -- to confuse friendship with what I had. I don't think many of us realize how energy draining is the low-choice period of our younger lives. The change that happens in time in this regard is just a natural process.
