Sour Grape or Sweet Lemon?

I just found out that an "old" friend that we hardly kept contact with bought a bigger house.

Toward the path of home ownership, John and I always use this friend as a reference point. How much they earned and how much their first house cost. For a new immigrant, buying first house in 3~4 years, is a great success story.

I'd love to own a small house. However, having been married for 6.5 years, we are still doing "soul searching" and taking detour from settling down.

Will we ever settle?

What does "settle" mean anyway?

To compromise?

Honestly, I would be lying to say I don't envy or feel jealous of my friend. However much I want a house, it was never the motivation for me to stay with a job or convince John not to look for changes.

Recently, I have been looking into the option of purchasing a condo in San Diego. I realize that we would have to make tremendous amount of sacrifice to own one. The reward isn't "homeownership" but the increase in value we could make in a year or two. It would be a "smart" investment in this crazy real estate market. Then I think, we wouldn't be happy penny-pinching, cutting down basic recreation like going to the desert in order to save gas cost (as gas is quite expensive these days), or have to eat mass produced instead of higher cost organic and locally grown foods. It's too unbearable.

Some day, we will have a little home in a lower-housing-cost town. Before then, John wants to, yet again, explore more of further education opportunities.

I can only hope it will be better for our future. I want to believe that we have made the all the right choices. We've been down this route twice but no process has made. Talk about frustration. Will we run in circles again?