🏠 Watching friends buy their own homes while I am still renting is getting to me

Three separate friends from my close circle have bought their own homes over the past year and a half, and while I am genuinely happy for each of them individually, there is a quieter feeling underneath that happiness that I have started noticing more the third time around than I did the first. I am thirty one, still renting the same one bedroom flat I moved into five years ago, and the math of actually buying something comparable here keeps looking further away rather than closer no matter how carefully I try to save each month. Part of it is genuinely about money, rents have gone up steadily in my area while my salary increases have not quite kept the same pace, but part of it is also about timing choices I made earlier that felt right at the time, staying in a lower paying but more flexible job for a few years, spending a fair amount on travel in my twenties that I do not actually regret experiencing, decisions that felt completely reasonable individually but that add up to a specific kind of financial gap now when I compare myself to friends who prioritized differently earlier on. Conversations about home loans, interest rates, and down payment amounts have started coming up more often in our friend group chat, and I mostly just read along without contributing much, not because I do not care, but because I genuinely do not have anything comparable to add to that specific conversation right now, and pretending otherwise would just feel a bit hollow. I know logically that everyone's financial path looks different depending on choices made years earlier, and that owning a home is not some universal marker of having your life together the way it can sometimes feel like in these comparisons. Still, the gap feels real every time another friend mentions moving into their own place while I renew the same rental agreement yet again. Has anyone else navigated this specific kind of comparison within a friend group, and did it ever genuinely stop stinging, or does it just become something you get better at not showing outwardly?