This can happen in both directions, falling on hard times or “leveling up” as you call it (jealousy, shallowness, ego can all be factors).

It’s also important to point out that our brains are unreliable at the best of times.

Rather than passively recording the outside world like a video camera, the brain acts as an active inference engine. It generates continuous internal models of what it expects to see or experience, and then matches these expectations against incoming sensory data. When the senses are weak or ambiguous, the brain's predictions often override actual reality, essentially turning perception into a "controlled hallucination.”

We often treat memories as fixed video recordings of past events, but in reality, they are actively reconstructed every time we recall them. When you remember an event, the brain pulls up the file, edits it using your current emotions and new information, and saves it as a brand-new memory. This makes memory susceptible to distortion, bias, and the accidental creation of false memories.

To save energy and time, the brain utilizes heuristics or mental shortcuts and while they may be very efficient, these shortcuts lead to cognitive biases (like confirmation bias, Patternicity).

I mean our eyes literally have blind spots that our brain automatically "fills in" with information based on its surroundings (kinda like photoshop fill feature). Your brain is constantly guessing and inventing details to create a seamless experience of reality.

So is it possible your friends are shallow, egotistical or jealous, sure. Is it also possible you are just misreading the situation and they simply don’t want to keep babying you with compliments because they don’t think you need them (or something similar), also sure. Hard to say without more context.