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JP has a quite good advice that adresses this and I think will give you an answer, the name of the video is Elon Musk's roomate and I think it will help you put things into perspective, but yes this is very common specially in our field

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkzZd_tbkFw

Statistically you will h do it keep going on

⬐ busymom0

> Perfect illustration of why "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with"

100%.

⬐ beforeolives

That's a very extreme example of someone at the top comparing themselves to someone even higher. What if you are neither of those people though? The key there is that Elon's roommate is still incredibly successful at what he does. What if you aren't successful at what you do at all?

If we put aside startups and business success and take a look at software engineers - there is a distribution of success. What if you're at the low end of the distribution and can't move from there? It's cool to hear about working at the big tech companies or the most successful startups, getting multiple competing offers for hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation, contributing to big and well-known projects etc. But what if that isn't you? What if you aren't even close to being average? What if you went to a bad college, didn't do well, got a job at one of the worst companies on the market (someone did) and now you're stuck doing boring work for a bad manager, you're getting a salary in the bottom 5% of software salaries and you're getting rejected every time you apply for anything better?

Hopefully, there's a better answer to this than just finding someone who is doing even worse than you in another field or somewhere else in the world and comparing yourself to them.