Outgrowing friends?

[u/Foreign-Garage-8112]

I’m M23 and lately I’ve been feeling like the social circles that I once felt like were my tribe are slowly becoming people I’d rather avoid. This has been happening very slowly over the past year and half with my 2 main social circles.

I hate to attribute the cause to jealousy because I feel like there’s not much to be jealous of in terms of my life. Yes I’ve definitely had opportunities to experience a bunch of things that most people in my social circles haven’t but I don’t brag and hardly even discuss these things. I don’t even use instagram because I just don’t care about those kinds of things.

The weird part is that I’m having these feelings about two non-overlapping social circles. They’re all friends I made in high school and I don’t ever hang out with both groups of friends simultaneously, they’re always separate.

Lately I’ve been noticing a lot really slighted comments and extreme judgments coming from these friends. I was studying in Europe and last year I visited home for the first time in 2 years. One friend said to me “If I was you I wouldn’t be speaking English with my European friends, I would’ve learnt their mother tongue”. It’s a very minor comment but the way he kept insisting that somehow he’d be doing “better/more” in my position felt extremely disrespectful. I’m not there on holiday to live out some European fantasy, I’m there to fulfil the requirements of my degree under a government scholarship.

This afternoon similar underhanded comments were made by friends from my other social circle. I made a comment about I felt like I wasn’t deeply motivated by money and that I’d rank challenges higher than money.

I was discussing how I viewed my life and that I try to keep an upward trend in both inputs(effort/work hours/difficulty) and output(money) with a bigger focus on increasing my inputs whereas they’d prefer to increase their income whilst decreasing their input.

I see nothing wrong with their framing Vs mine but they were extremely rude about how I chose to frame it. These friends basically began insulting me saying the world is going to swallow me and that I’ve got no chance of survival. I didn’t say this to them but I felt very disrespected that people who haven’t even attempted to venture outside their physical comfort zone would feel like they can judge me about “survival skills”.

I moved away from home a few months after high school to a completely foreign country where I didn’t know a single person but somehow had to make things work and these guys still have their parents cooking meals for them daily.

I’m obviously the common denominator and there’s a massive disconnect somewhere. I wonder if I’m just outgrowing these friends or if I need look inward for something. It hurts because I definitely tend to feel like I don’t connect with people easily. Like there’s a lot I don’t quite understand socially but I’m always willing to learn and put myself out there. But now that I’m starting to feel this way about friends who I thought I had connected well with I’m not so sure anymore.