Sometimes I feel like a whingy whiney bitch, Complaining about my job, complaining about my bills and often (being a female) complaining just for the sake of it, but this weekend I discovered a whole new level of misery!

I spent the last three days up in Manchester in one or two bars, the cinema and sporadically in the group of neurotic, high earning, over ambitious, singletons. Now THEY can complain!!

They complain about being single but then claim they couldn’t possibly go out with someone who earns less than themselves. They complain about stress at work and then proceed to tell you about the nth holiday they have booked for this year for the “Costa Del Wherever”. They complain about their jobs and then tell you how it is company policy to travel first class whenever they need to travel.

It started to grate pretty quickly.

After listening for a good few hours to them complaining about how good they had I started to feel like shit! No I don’t have a 6 figure salary and I don’t have any aspirations of work myself into an early grave to get one either. Hell when you look at my basic earnings I don’t even have a 5 figure salary yet and by god I wished all I had to worry about was where to book my next holiday or how much is it really necessary to pay to get your hair cut! I don’t jet around the world on my holidays with friends every couple of months and I am exactly the under-achiever that they describe as not being a suitable person for them to hook up with!

I started to feel really REALLY bad about myself, about who I am. I started to look back at what I always considered to be achievements and putting them into their perspective and then they look like not achievements at all, just me being under ambitious! I started to really analyze myself and I came up seriously lacking, but then in turn I started analyzing those around me and I came to the conclusion that for all the money and talk I really am better off already!

I don’t have the worlds greatest income, and I don’t thing it will be making any drastic improvements any time soon , But then again I don’t have the 10 hour working days and nothing but the bottom of an empty bottle to keep me company at the end of it. I don’t live out of a suitcase, I have a stable loving family and environment to go home to with realistic dreams about what I want not idealistic unobtainable fantasies.

So I left Manchester and the high flying socialites to their drinks holidays and microwave meals for one content that I was going back to a daily grind of minimum wage slavery. Knowing that although I don’t earn as much as I’d like or anywhere near as much as they think I should I already have a life so much more fulfilling than theirs, because for everything that they have and can have that I cant afford I have the one thing you simply cant buy….

…happiness!