Stoic advice for watching your ex succeed after holding you back?
I was in my first relationship for 2.5 years while in university. I was very ambitious, studious, and driven, while he was lazy and unmotivated. We were both studying computer science.
He used to get upset at me for not spending enough "quality time" with him, although I saw him almost every day and called him nightly, and it got to the extent that he would start arguments the night before assignment deadlines, exams and job interviews, etc. There were times I made it to the final rounds of interviews for extremely prestigious companies, and he would lash out at me for not spending enough "quality time" literally the night before the interview (coding/technical interviews for which I was trying to prepare).
In the meantime, I was doing my best to support him. When he was too lazy to apply for internships, I would find listings for him to apply to, help him with his resumés and cover letters, do background research to help him prepare for interviews because he always insisted he didn't need to do anything to prepare. I helped him a lot with his schoolwork, too, but otherwise he cheated his way through it using AI or getting answers from other people.
I finally broke up with him a few months ago, and in that time, he has suddenly gained a lot of motivation to succeed in his career. To the extent that the internship he landed is better than mine. It isn't really that his work ethic changed, because all of his side projects are completely AI-generated, and he says he can't code without AI, and he also flat-out lies on his resume 😭 But he is still successful.
I am struggling a lot with resentment now. Partly because, whenever I speak to him these days, he lacks the sensitivity not to brag about how great his internship is and how well he's doing. Partly because I don't think he deserves it, both on a moral level after how he treated me and on a practical level because he cheated and conned his way to get there. A massive part of it is insecurity, comparing my trajectory to his, feeling so incredibly stupid that I didn't leave the very first time he hindered me from studying for an exam. I know I should cut him off, that his life has no effect on mine anymore, that the world isn't fair and injustices exist. But I find it extremely emotionally hard to let go of him and face the concept of forever without a person who meant a lot to me for a very long time in spite of everything. And yet staying in contact with him just continually brings up such intense resentment and insecurity.
I wonder if anyone has any relevant texts or concepts from stoicism to address something like this