💼 Regret quitting a stable government job for a private one that turned out worse

Four years ago I left a steady government job, decent pay, guaranteed pension, genuinely low stress most days, to join a private company offering almost double the salary and what sounded like a much faster growth path at the time. On paper it looked like an obviously smart move, and most of my family and friends encouraged me to take it, pointing out how much more I could earn while I was still young enough to actually make the switch. The first year was genuinely fine, the pay bump was real and I told myself the extra stress was simply the cost of better opportunity. By the second year, restructuring hit the company, and I found myself doing the work of two people for the same salary, with no real path forward being discussed anymore despite the original promises made during hiring. The third year brought a new manager who made it clear my role was considered replaceable, and the sense of security I had taken for granted in my old job simply did not exist here in any real form. What actually stings the most is not even the stress itself, but running into an old colleague from the government office a few months back, someone who stayed behind and has since been promoted twice, seemingly stable and content in a way I genuinely have not felt in years since I left. My parents, though they never say it directly, occasionally bring up how well that same colleague seems to be doing, and I know it is not meant as a comparison, but it lands like one anyway every single time. I do not think going back is realistically possible at this point, too much time has passed and the specific process for reentry is genuinely difficult once you have left. Some days I tell myself the experience gained here will eventually pay off somewhere else, other days it just feels like four years spent chasing something that quietly turned out to be worse than what I already had. Has anyone else made a similar move away from stability and later regretted it, and did you find a way to actually make peace with the decision, or does the specific what if just linger indefinitely?

Made almost the identical switch eight years ago and spent the first two years convinced I had made a huge mistake every time an old colleague mentioned a promotion. What eventually helped was stopping the direct comparison entirely, their path and mine simply diverged, and holding both against each other constantly was only ever going to make me feel worse regardless of how either career actually turned out.