If someone else's life is bugging you, it's time to take a deep hard look at your own and figure out why. It's not about coping with *their* success, it's about figuring out why your own successes aren't making you feel satisfied.
I do want to hone in on this one post comment though because if it was this easy, then I could likely find truth there.
First, no one ever said it was easy. It's just necessary. If you do it right, it will be some of the hardest work you have ever done, but it will put you in a better place.
What you are feeling is completely normal. You are at a time in life where you probably have more work years behind you than ahead of you, where you are experiencing your own version of the Peter Principle, and where it is completely natural to reevaluate your career goals and expectations. You also are about at the point where you may have more
life behind you than ahead of you, which makes it completely natural to reevaluate what you really want and value out of life and whether you are on the right track to get there.
The problem with turning points like this is that many, many options are still available to you -- but now you're wise and experienced enough to understand that each of those options comes with tradeoffs. Do you want to throw yourself into your career and achieve that kind of success and recognition that you see your coworkers getting? You can probably do that; it just means postponing FIRE, working a lot harder, angling for promotions/plum assignments, and a bunch of other stuff you are probably happy
not to deal with right now. Or do you want to FIRE and move on to other life goals ASAP? You can probably do that, too; it just means cutting back on your lifestyle expectations and giving up those career aspirations for personal freedom.
When you find yourself having an unexpectedly strong, negative reaction to someone else's success,
that is about you, not them. It is a signal that you need to re-evaluate the path that you are currently on, to see if it is actually what you really want for your life, or if it is just something that you have been mindlessly following for years and doesn't actually fit you any more. E.g., are you really chasing FIRE because you are excited about the freedom and personal opportunities it opens up? Or is it more that you really, deep down, want to achieve things in your career, but your imposter syndrome has convinced you that you'll fail, and your fear of failure has convinced you that it's better/safer not to try at all (because that way you at least have plausible deniability, i.e., "well, I coulda done it if I'd tried, I just didn't want to"), and "oh, I'm going to FIRE" is a nice mental salve so that you can pretend you're running toward something instead of running away from your fears?*
How you do that analysis is hard, because it forces you to look at yourself -- your fears, your hopes and dreams, your life, your choices -- with brutal honesty. You can't hide or bullshit yourself. Given what you've written here, counseling can be a good option to get over that initial hump, because imposter syndrom is a magnificent bullshit artist. But once you get past that, the key to finding what you really want is to look at the reality of the options before you, good and bad, completely unvarnished. What are all of your great dreams? What would that give you -- not the money/power/prestige, but what is the feeling you are chasing (sense of accomplishment maybe for work-related goals; connection to others for personal goals; etc.); you're looking for the emotional "thing" hiding underneath those exterior trappings. And then, taking for granted that you have what it takes to achieve them, what will it take to do so? And are you willing to accept those tradeoffs?**
I guarantee you that once you go through this first round, you will decide that you are
not willing to do what it really takes to reach some extreme goal -- you're not going to care enough about the work to chase the billion-dollar salary, and you're not going to care enough about FIRE to quit tomorrow and subsist on whatever you have.*** So now the key is to figure out what version of "in-between" provides you the maximum happiness for the minimum acceptable tradeoffs. This is where you go back to those underlying values/feelings that you identified -- i.e., maybe it's not about getting some stupid award, but it's feeling like you have contributed something meaningful in a field you care about, or doing something that will advance science/be remembered in future years, or feeling like you matter to the people you work with/for, or feeling smart and validated, or whatever. So how else can you achieve that feeling, without sacrificing everything else that matters to you? Maybe it's going into an "individual contributor"/highly technical path in lieu of a management path that would give higher pay (e.g., trading FIRE date for more meaningful work in the meantime); maybe it's changing your work to another industry or nonprofit; or maybe it's realizing that work isn't really the "passion" that we were all brought up to believe that it is, and that your best path to finding meaning is to treat the work like a paycheck and join groups/volunteer/write the Great American Novel; do whatever that other thing is you have been postponing because it wasn't what you were "supposed" to do.
The actual answer doesn't matter; there are as many "right" answers as there are people on the earth. What matters is doing the analysis (without bullshitting yourself), accepting what you find, and then having the courage to go change whatever you need to change to get there, with full knowledge and acceptance of the tradeoffs.
I guarantee you that once you are confidently on the right path for
you, others' successes won't cause more than a temporary blip of envy.
*Ask me how I know.
** I call this the "even George Clooney throws his dirty socks on the floor" test -- you're focusing on the realities of the day-to-day, not the pretty perfect picture.
*** Because if you really felt that overwhelmingly strongly about either extreme path, you'd already be doing it and not looking back.