Obsession with IB prestige ruined my life.

My obsession with the prestige of working in IB has completely ruined my life. I’ve lost my close friends my long time girlfriend & my family don’t want me around them anymore.

My obsession with finance first started when I watched a few finance movies like the big short and the wolf of wall street and decided I wanted to be a banker (I know pretty dumb reason retrospectively but I was 16 at the time). Pretty much grew obsessed with the lifestyle and just decied that this was my dream.

Eventually got admitted to a target and as a freshman would constantly talk about IB recruiting and how great IB was. This is all I would talk about with friends & family (literally 24/7). Instead of hanging out with friends and having a life I spent all my time networking, nailing my technicals and applying for SA roles. I don’t think this was inherently bad but they did start to get sick off it after I pretty much made every thing finance related.

Secured a role at a BB in the FIG group but at this point it had been years of constantly talking and thinking about how to break into IB. When some of my close friends started working in less prestigious roles like accounting, BO, MO, Marketing, Sales I would pretty much berate them and tell them how useless they were for not being able to work in a job as prestigious as mine. I told them they were lazy because they cared about “work life balance” and weren’t money motivated like me. I thought I was encouraging them to do better things at the time but turns out they took it the wrong way. They didn’t really care about IB since they were more into “having life outside of work” but I ridiculed them to the point that they told me they no longer wanted to hang out anymore and grew distant. At the time I didn’t care because I was a banker working on wall street I didn’t need friends right?

I was also in a relationship for 3 years but ended up pushing my girlfriend away because she wasn’t doing anything “worthwhile” with her life and I deserved someone better who also worked in something as prestigious as me. (she was studying psychology). I told her that she didn’t deserve me because I would find a hot girl who was a model for Vogue or something along those lines. She laughed in my face and told me I had “changed” and that I no longer had a personality apart for my job which no one cared about. I ignored her.

My family also really began to dislike me as I started putting pressure on my younger siblings to work in FO finance and told them if they did anything else they would be losers (ended up forcing them to send applications to a lot of firms). My siblings were more into tech & corporate law but told them: Tech bros are sweaty nerds who don’t have any prestige and corporates lawyers just push the paper for the real winners: Bankers. They thought I was behaving like an idiot and eventually also distanced themselves from me because I was a douche apparently.

At the time I didn’t care about all this because, I had no social life outside of work but a lot of people at the office now hate me too after a recent incident that happened at work. My department all recently went out for drinks and I stupidly shouted “make way the bankers from INSERT BANK NAME are here”. Everyone gave me a weird look and my VP started apologising on my behalf. After overhearing a few conversations and having a honest talk with an associate I work with, turns out the other analysts and pretty much everyone in the office think I have no personality and actively avoid working with me because all I talk about is how much better we are than everyone else.

I’ve also gotten into a few altercations with compliance and have receieved warnings for these. They sent comments on a pitchbook I had created and I told them they didn’t have the right to tell me what to do because I was higher than them in the food chain and they therefore worked for me and the all the other FO staff so they should treat us correctly as their superiors.

Long story short I’ve realised I may have pushed this idea of prestige a bit too far although IB is still by far the most prestigious job someone can do. Anyone have any advice on how to re connect with my ex friends and my family after I’ve pushed them away for years now. Also any tips on how to get build a good reputation in the office after I’ve messed it up this badly? Have no idea what else to do if I lose my job.