Chapter 1: What if my parents' opinions are holding me back?
What if your parents' opinion of you is actually a really bad thing and it's holding you back and it's making your life way more miserable than it needs to be? And instead of you being able to spread your wings like a golden eagle from Dutch Bros, you instead feel like you are a failure.
Even though you haven't even lived most of your life, you're young, you're ambitious, but you have convinced and drilled into your mind that you will never be as perfect as your parents want you to be. What do you do? Well, their opinion will always stay the same.
No matter what happens, I want you to realize that you will not be able to change your parents' mind if they have their mind already made up about who you need to be, what you need to do, how you need to live your life, what job you need to have, what school you need to go to. That won't change. Now, I understand that parental approval is very important.
And for a lot of us, we spend our entire life chasing after our dad just giving us a pat on the back and saying, hey, good job, man. You did good. But if you're not going to receive that by doing the things that you genuinely want to do for yourself, what is the point in bending over backwards for your family? And it's hard because for some of us, it's in our...
It's just in our culture that our elders, our family, they have priority in terms of our life, like our own life. They are the ones that dictate the choices, that tell us what med school we need to go to, even who we need to elope with. But I just want you to understand that this will hold you back.
I spent a lot of my adolescent life chasing after what I thought other people wanted of me, especially my parents. Even though my parents were never that pressy in terms of, you need to get this kind of job, you need to go to this kind of school. Like, they were very, very supportive of me trying different things and just going out and giving it a shot.
I, for some reason, had drilled it into my mind that I wanted to be successful for them. Now, in terms of what successful means for me, it was retiring my parents, buying them an awesome, you know, car and like being able to put the tap to pay when we would go out to dinner, you know, and just like I'm rolling in the dough. But my parents don't care about any of that. They want me to be happy.
And I have that luxury. I'm very blessed for that. You might not have that same reality. Maybe your parents are putting a lot of pressure on you. Maybe you're an immigrant child, you're the golden child, and your parents remind you how much they sacrificed to come to this country, the best country on earth, and make something happen.
And you're realizing as a young adult that a lot of the dreams you were promised as a young kid, they've been stripped away from all of us and groceries are $200 a week. It's a weird reality because even though we are experiencing one thing, we are having trouble finding someone to date in our hometown. That doesn't just want to have a casual thing.
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Chapter 2: How can I find my own path despite parental expectations?
And I think that you have to realize that your relationship is that of God. You're their kid. And that's it. And it's okay. You don't need to be their best friend. You don't need to be somebody that has something to prove to them all the time. You can be kind. You can be courteous. But if your parents are getting in the way of you growing as a human being, understand where the boundary is set.
Because if you will spend the rest of your life trying to appease your parents, you will realize that you have never lived your own life. You will never live it because you will be so focused on pleasing everything they say and it will domino into every facet of your life. Imagine a future where you find a partner that you really like.
You find a guy during a backpacking trip in Italy and he's so suave and he has a great sense of great music taste or whatever and he loves to dress in those like cardigan sweaters and you're in love with him. And you bring them to your parents. And your parents, they have a vision of you marrying some kind of nice southern boy.
Or, I don't know, they have like, they want you to be with, I don't know, a hedge fund billionaire son.
Chapter 3: What role does parental approval play in our lives?
Right? They're going to dog on your choice. As long as you're happy, sweetie. But it's your life. It's not their life. And I think that that is something we forget time and time again, especially now that we are, you know, as a generation living with our parents longer.
You are going to butt heads with your parents naturally, especially if they come from a world of sacrifice and they come from a world of scarcity. And you can look at them and judge them for it. But then again, your parents are doing the best with what they had. And for a lot of them growing up, maybe they just didn't understand that you could one day have a career in something that's more risky.
Maybe they didn't understand that you can go to school and study something you really love because you are going to find a way to make that your entire life's mission. It's easier said than done because I'm sure you've tried to convince your folks of something. You've tried to please them at Thanksgiving dinner or now Christmas dinner, right? Being like, Hey, like guys, I'm doing great.
Actually, you know, I have a couple of people buying my art and like my literature club is going good. And they're like, you went to nursing school, get a nursing job. It will make you feel like a failure. The bar needs to be set by you. What I've noticed is that sometimes our parents want to help a little too much. They want us to be a little too safe.
And when they notice that we don't have enough evidence and enough confidence in the thing that we're doing for ourselves, they instead want to overstretch their hands and be like, Hey, wait, you could, you could do consulting. Hey, you could work for me. You could do this thing. But in reality,
Figuring out what you're going to do for the rest of your life as an 18 to 30 year old Does not happen in 24 hours It takes a decade. It takes time. It takes failure and If you are already telling yourself that you will never be good enough for something then you won't do anything and
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Chapter 4: How do cultural expectations affect personal choices?
You won't do anything about it. You will sit there and just be like, I'm cooked. Genuinely, that is what's going to happen. And I'm telling you this because I know, because that was my outlook on my life. I became so just doomed in terms of my decision making. I started living in the past. I started regretting the fact that I didn't study harder.
I didn't get into a better university and that I was like, you know, just playing around and I wasn't taking anything seriously. But what I wasn't realizing in that moment was that I was devoting a lot of my time to Towards my passions and towards things that maybe in the moment weren't going to bring me any opportunities or pay for my, you know, $30 matcha.
But I kept going down that path and eventually I got opportunities that I was able to use the skills I got from my passions. My parents didn't see that though. When I went home from college because I didn't get an internship because I procrastinated on applying and I devoted all of my time into learning editing softwares and animation softwares, they didn't understand that.
They were kind of just like, well, he's doing his own thing and they were very grateful, you know, very gracious in terms of that. But your parents might just not understand your path in life and that is okay. They don't need to. They don't need to. Same thing with your friends. They might be telling you, why are you not playing basketball, bro? You are 6'7".
Literally, you should be a power forward. You should be dunking. But if your heart is not in it, you won't do it. And you might have a lot of criticism and a lot of people telling you, man, you are really missing out. But again, it's your life. It's your life. Zerky, what do I do to stop feeling like a failure? Because now I'm at a point where I just feel like I've cooked my own life.
I feel so terrible about all of the circumstances that I've been dealt. Maybe you're in debt. Maybe you feel like you had a great girlfriend, boyfriend, partner. You fumbled them. Your life is ruined. Admit that you're a failure. Just admit it. Because what you are going to do is the more that you sit there and you'll be like, oh man, I might be a failure and you're worrying about it.
It could be solved with you just saying, I failed. I failed. I didn't take my school seriously enough. I failed. I had an opportunity for a giant job lined up out of college. I didn't take it because I was just lazy. I failed.
You didn't text her back. You failed. You failed. Now what? We did the pitying. We're upset. But that does not change our life. It doesn't.
We're still here. We're still going to have to wake up tomorrow. We're still going to have to buy a $30 matcha. Still going to have to read feminist literature while we're outside of the coffee shop. We're still going to have to do these things. So now it's a decision. Can you accept the fact that you failed? Not only that, can you admit it? That you weren't perfect.
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Chapter 5: What should I do if my parents don't understand my career choices?
My dad always said I was better at soccer. I would never try that. No, not what your dad said. Do you think you could play pickleball? That's my question. I mean, I don't know. I've never tried it. That's your answer. It's not that, well, somebody told me that and therefore. That has nothing to do with anything. And it is so easy to latch on to these things.
They're little monkey bars that allow you to kind of balance yourself and make you feel like, oh, I have a sense of self. I know who I am. Why? Why close that entirely? Why not just be an open vessel for whatever might happen? Well, because growing up, I was told that I was more of like, you know, a Windows kid. Well, screw it. I got the Mac bracelet on right now. Come on.
You don't have to be in one box. You never do. You never will have to do that unless you choose it for yourself. Then you will forever stay that way and you will forever experience a life where you just are defined by what your parents think. The solution is building evidence for yourself.
The solution is finding things that make you very uncomfortable but are things that excite you and doing them over and over and over again. And you will hate it. You will hate it. I promise you, because it's not comfortable. And for a lot of us, we love comfort. This is our entire world now is all around comfort. If you don't want to talk to somebody, you don't need to.
You can get food delivered. You can exist. You can watch the best entertainment in the world at your fingertips. You can also get intimate with an AI chat bot. The world is built in a way to keep you in comfort. And you know what else is comfortable? Subscribing to the beliefs that your parents have already built for you.
On their own insecurities, on their own regrets, on their own things that they wish they did differently. Of course, unfortunately, they're going to push that onto you. They will. And sometimes they might not even know it. They might just do it.
And it's up to you to kind of sort out the word salad of why don't you work harder at school so you can get a good job and be like your brother who's going to Yale this year. And it's like, bro, like chill. Whoa. Another underrated hack. You can say no.
But saying no to your parents is complicated because if your parents are like, we're going to kick you out of the house, then you might have to kind of play along and do your little puppet dance and be like, yes, dad, I love school and it's great. You know, hey, it's cool. As soon as you get out of that world, as soon as you get out of their house, it's done. All that is done.
Like you get to you can even do it now. You don't need to tell your parents that you're trying out for your school's debate team. You just do it and then tell them I have practice and go do it. A lot of us ask for permission. We ask for permission from our parents, from our friends, from our significant others.
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