The Best Revenge: A Platitude
You have been badly wronged. Your wife dumped you, the firm whose success is largely due to your efforts fired you, your friends--you thought they were your friends--turned against you, attacked you, and told nasty lies about you to all and sundry. Now what?
The natural instinct is for revenge--to hurt those who hurt you. If your wife wants a divorce, make the process as long and unpleasant as you can. Badmouth your ex-firm. Tell all and sundry about the wickedness of your false friends.
It's probably a mistake. Strategies of revenge only prolong relations you are already finding unpleasant and humiliating--better to end them. All and sundry are likely to conclude that, whether or not you were wronged by your friends, you have become an unpleasant bore to be avoided.
There is a better solution. Put heart and mind into finding, wooing, winning a wife better suited to you and making this marriage work. Ten years hence your ex-wife, on her third divorce, will realize what a mistake she made. Join another firm, keep a closer eye on its internal politics while working you, and it, to the top, and in time your ex-employers may notice what they threw away. Ignore your ex-friends while making a shining success of your own life. Publish a best-selling novel, write the most-cited article in your field, make a lot of money, succeed in whatever ways matter to you--and them. Whoever it is who wronged you made an implicit judgement of you by doing so. Prove, by your actions, how wrong it was.
It might work as revenge--is at least as likely to as more direct tactics. And if it doesn't, you have used the emotional energy of your anger to do something worth doing. Even if ex-wife, ex-firm, and ex-friends never notice, you have ended up with a happy marriage, a good job, a successful life.
"Living well is the best revenge." George Herbert