I, personally, grew up with a giant lack of self-confidence. After I turned 25, along with quarantine to truly understand myself, I feel I have gained more confidence/self-worth.
My field is technology, but most of all my friends are not “engineers” and I have felt I have been missing out on some key bonds that are preventing me from sharing my knowledge to grow with them in a mutually beneficial way. I felt most of my friends were of the business kind that “always had an idea” and had a pocket engineer to talk to.
But, recently the past 2 years I have been more “mature” saying no to things or starting to give low-level, instead of high-level, overviews about certain topics. I felt it was in-fact hurting my career, to not talk in-depth so I began to join discords and build up my social vernacular observing/conversing with engineers online. But, whenever an in-real life discussion would start with a topic that I had researched, I would always make sure to “correct it” in case fake observations are brought up and/or decisions were made based on them.
Lately, though I have felt I have lost bonds with almost all of my in real life friends. And I can’t tell if, I am the *sshole, or if I have just “grown?”. I have felt that I was always aware of how I shared my “side of the story” and/or reasoning behind my decisions respectfully. But, I just can’t get it out of my head that I am in the wrong in some way.
In general I would say this is a common experience around this age, at least in western cultures.
However I think there is no rule to life, friends depend on a lot of things, from both sides, so they can change throughout your life. It is up to you to try and foster the ones you want.
I never aligned it to being a common thing in western cultures. That’s pretty insightful. Oddly though, recently I have been romanticizing the notion of living for a year in my parent’s home country, hearing anecdotally, watching videos of content creators from there, how the culture/people in that part of the word is more familial.