Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence?

I’m afraid that this post will have very little to do with copywriting issues, but this is something I have been thinking about for quite a while. I have not heard information about my classmates for ages and I have been wondering how they are doing, how they live, what they do, what they achieved. It’s always interesting to compare how life treats different people, especially the people you know. Someone is rich, someone is poor, someone is happy, someone is miserable, someone is loved, someone is lonely and so on and so forth. Recently I have signed in to odnoklassniki.ru – the service which allows to search for your classmates, college mates, colleagues by the time you finished school, or graduated from college or worked for this or that company.

I was amazed, not to say shocked, to find out that about 95% of my schoolmates now live abroad! The USA, Italy, Germany… and these are mostly people who you would never think of. The girls are married to an American/Italian and already have kids; the guys study at a college or University. It is so interesting… you know these people, spend 11 school years with them and then about 7 years later you find out that they have an absolutely new life so different from ours. You browse the photos that they placed there, and watch their happy faces and gorgeous surroundings and somehow automatically start thinking: “Oh, Gee, why didn’t I do the same?” In my case, it is even more offending, for I was in the States but never stayed there… Why? Who knows… Maybe be I had too much affection to my home country, maybe I didn’t find anything special and lucrative in the life abroad? Maybe something else. It is difficult to say now exactly why I decided to go away and come back to Belarus. But at that time I knew for sure that I did right. And, now, when I see the data about my schoolmates who also went to the States supported by the same Work and Travel Program as I was some time ago, I start thinking what would have happened if I stayed and started a new life away from my family and my home country… Would have something changed for the better? Or not? How would I look like and what would I do?

To some extent, I felt a bit miserable when I found that out. Because I live in Belarus, I have a university degree and quite a well-paid job, I have created a family and everything seems quite rosy for me and it would have seemed so if I didn’t know that there is a better life somewhere and that someone I know lives it. My schoolmates must look down on me now. They are cool and successful.

Maybe I am wrong. But this question freaks me out sometimes. Especially when I see things happening in Belarus, when I start to understand that maybe nothing good awaits either me or my future kids here, and what would they say to me when grow up? Will they blame me that I gave them birth in the country which has no future… ? Terrible… I would appreciate your opinion about that.