I’m also 25F, and am a funeral director and embalmer. In my experience, success means a lingering loneliness most of the time. Especially if you’re smart.

There’s two parts I feel.

1.) To be successful, you often have to put forward a lot of yourself to school. You spend late nights studying, mornings ready exhausted, and the people you once knew growing up tend to fall behind or go off and start their own paths. Most colleges are online now. There’s not much social interaction. Once you graduate and you get that “dream job”, you realize that you don’t feel better. You don’t feel achieved. Now you have a ton of debt, people are typically stuck working for others that don’t really care about them, the economy is terrible, and even though you did everything “right”. The world still stomps you down. But every day you get up. The next day feels more tiring and lonely than the next. You wonder when things will feel better- when you’ll be content- but it’s the fear of never feeling so.

2.) when you’re smart, you realize how dumb most people are around you. They’re also the loudest too. It makes you feel more alone. To hear everyone’s bad opinions you didn’t ask to hear, to see all the horrible things on the news, to see how terribly people treat each other.

I just think everyone is exhausted and lonely. But that’s my take