How should a social scientist deal with envy of disciplines that are more quantitatively rigorous? I am a student in social science who got into quantitative research at the start of my graduate school. Since then, I have had the valuable opportunity to take many Statistics classes and become aware of this world I had not known before. However, with it comes the curse of envy, as I cannot help but feel that my discipline, albeit using quantitative methods, is not as sophisticated (i.e. using a method without understanding the assumption and the derivation, basically relying on canned statistical package that others recommend). Outside of academia, the industry job market has also spoken that these quant researchers are more valuable than I am.

With this attitude of mine, I've become increasingly cynical about my discipline. I don't feel that the work that we do is "scientific" and "accumulating knowledge." I don't think that my industry job market can be competitive. This obviously has harmful effect on both my mental health and my research. I just want to learn more stats, write more code, instead of doing the research of my field.

On rare moments of clarity, I suppose this envious feeling is turtle all the way down perhaps. I'm envious of the statisticians, but maybe the statisticians are envious of the mathematicians, etc. This is why I decide to ask Academia Stackexchange for perspective.

From my occasional conversations, I get a sense that some of my fellow students may have the same feelings. However, given the toxic nature of my thoughts, I can't really discuss them widely with friends, not to mention with my professors.

How to deal with these thoughts?

PS: The relevant xkcd that will inevitable show up in the comments :-)

PPS: Given the gravity and scope of this question, I don't feel entitled to picking a "correct" answer. Thus I will just let the community upvotes decide the visibility of the answers. I hope that the answerers don't mind -- thank you for your insights.
Speaking as one outside of the social sciences whose work has been strongly influenced by readings from social science, I think it may be clearer if you tease apart three concepts that are often conflated: rigor, funding, and importance:


The mathematical or analytical rigor of a subject makes it more difficult for outsiders to understand or hold an opinion on, and inaccessibility can make things seem more important, but all it really shows is that it is hard to understand.  
The amount of money thrown at a subject is another easy proxy for importance, but all that really shows is either popularity or market structure.


Social sciences actually deal with a lot of the really hard problems of society, the things that we all struggle with and don't know how to deal with well, like injustice and politics and social conflict.  We in the hard sciences and engineering like to pretend that we can solve these problems by the injection of new technologies, but all we can really do is create disruptions that destabilize the current order, following which society may become either more inclusive (e.g., the creation of the internet) or more exploitative (e.g., the creation of QoS protocols, leading to the current battle over net neutrality).

Social sciences are further challenged by problems of instrumentation (most of what they care about is really hard or inappropriate to measure), replicability (many phenomena are large enough or long enough duration that we've only got one or a few data points), and experimental controls (many interesting experiments cannot be performed because they would be horrifyingly unethical, e.g., isolating populations from the rest of society).

And yet... and yet I think the social sciences produce some of the most important work for us as humanity, because the work done therein is part of the reason that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.

So I think it's OK for a social scientist to envy the accessibility of data for people who only need to build a multi-billion dollar machine in order to do their research.  But don't envy them their field: your problems are just as important as theirs.