I wish you good luck in escaping their influence.
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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Not really, but I didn't have unrealistic goals.
I had extended family help fiance my education. Part of that help was tied to the idea that I could take over the loans after college with my own pay, which turned out to be true. If I didn't get family help, my education options were a lot more limited.
I later had a conversation with one of my parents that my career choice was limited on being able to fund my education after graduation. Extended family members were able to pursue degrees with less earning potential, including a degree in the arts, because their parents were willing to subsidize their expenses during and after college, while I didn't have that luxury.
I don't know how achievable your goals are without family monetary support. If you need other peoples' money to achieve your goals, you need a financial plan to make sure you can do it. If you don't need anyone else's money to do what you want, fuck the haters.
What irks me the most about that kind of attitude is the idea that stuff has to make money to be worthwhile. It's perverse. Nobody is allowed personal growth or passions any more, absolutely everything needs to be grinded out as a side hustle.
Tell someone what you do or create in your free time and half the time they'll start asking what your channels for monetisation on that are. Do you sell it on etsy? You making videos on that? Why not try contacting local business and selling that skill? Did you know you could sign up for this signal-boosting ad-share service to maximise engagement so you can easily compare your ROI?
And inside you're dying because "dude, no, i just wanted to try my hand at making a spice rack"
I have not once had a friend ask me these sorts of questions. You need to make different friends.
My mother went all in on this philosophy, to the point that growing up I wasn't allowed to have hobbies or be in extracurriculars unless I was planning to monetize them. The only thing it did was kill my self-worth and make me feel like all hobbies are inherently pointless, because the vast majority of people will never be able to make money on them. It's such an insane, toxic ideology.
You can thank our society by entirely focusing on economy ignoring human rights the moment this shift started(climate change). If only my sociology professor could hear this.
Many people who grow up and achieve their dream job start to hate it because doing your hobby as a job starts to suck after a while.
Yup. I've been listening to 'You shouldn't be an astronomer, you can't make money as one'. Now I work at the state railways, I constantly have myself sent to school like driving a maintenance engine. You guessed right right I also got the 'don't work at the railways'. There's not much of my family I contact these days.
Yup. Everything I wanted to be as a child. "That's unrealistic, give up. Get a degree and work in a cubicle. You're too lazy to ever be an athlete."
So I've spent the last 3 months telling my mother she's too stupid to vote, and pointed out that trump agrees.
Every 'goal' my family gave me and then forced me into pursuing?
Sure, they praised me when I accomplished those things.
Every goal I actually chose for myself, and achieved?
At best, absolutely no help of any kind when I'd ask them for help, general constant dissuasion and negging, and then after I achieve those goals, massive, massive passive aggressive jealously and constant belittling.
I now live several states away, don't communicate with them, and have finally been able to establish a sense of self, and self-esteem, based around my own assesment of what are good traits and goals, instead of basing them on trying to please incompetent bullies.
...
If your goals are, as you say in another post, learning how to make a vidro game, learning to draw, learning basic programming/web design...
These are literally all goals that pretty much most people with sufficient spare time and diligence could figure out the basics of and even become decently competent at with a few years of time... not even in a formal education setting, though that could likely help.
Your goals are extremely reasonable, your family is being ridiculous.
Are you guaranteed to become wealthy via pursuit of these goals? No, of course not.
But you aren't guaranteed that in most other careers or lines of work either.
If you don't already have gobs of money and/or influential connections... chances are, you never will.
Unless you are like abadoning a fairly solid career path that you're already significantly time/money invested in, and just completely abandoning all means of keeping yourself able to eat and sleep indoors for the full time pursuit of hobbies...
Then no, there's nothing wrong with wanting to learn more skills.
I'm constantly getting pressured to run on the corporate hamster wheel. I'm so over that life!
Give us some examples? What goals are you being asked to give up on?
learning how to make videogames, learning to program a site, drawing, etc.
I was going to ask the same.
Those goals are not even that "out there", but to play the devil's advocate here for a moment.
Is it because your family know you, and you tend to flit from one "big idea" to the next, and they are worried about you putting in a lot of time and effort, to then get bored and move on to the next one. Or perhaps you have always been an outdoors kinda person, the idea of you sitting in front of a computer for hours on end, just is way out of your "normal".
I'm not saying they are correct, but if they genuinely care about you, maybe ask why they think it is a bad idea.
In saying that, maybe they are just cunts.
There are so many variables, like an you just out of school or university, are you mid career on your 40's and looking for a change, are you recently retired and have always held an interest.....
Follow your passion, but also be practical. For example art was my passion, but I realized at Uni that I wasn't going to make a living at it so went into trades/engineering. I also enjoyed the C64 programming.
But now I get to use my keen art eye for building some neat 3d CAD renderings and sharp looking PowerPoint's for corporate presentations. And I'm not a real coder, but the basic functions I can build into our CAD software to automate design work and configurations, based on designer value entries.
Just keep learning new things and decide which things you want to continue to chase. Some things are easier than others, but people do these things and also started at a point where they might have known nothing. It's about how much effort you are willing to put in to gain these skills.
Of course you gotta do stuff to pay the bills now, but don't let people destroy your ambitions for the future.
You can learn those things any time. Do you mean your goal is for your income to be from games/webdesign/art? In that case you can always join a company. If you mean you want to independently create and sell your works it's going to be very tough. You're essentially starting your own business and most business startups fail.
If they make you feel happy, don't listen to them. You may even get good enough to a point where you could make a decent living out of it, if not then you still learned something that could end up being useful when combined with something else.
This sounds like an example of the "crab bucket mentality." It's very common, especially among groups who have experienced trauma such as poverty, war, or racism.
You can absolutely live your own life, and learn the things you're interested in. Still, it's good to keep some compassion for your family members. They probably do love you and want you to be happy. They might just be frightened of you stepping outside their reality.
I wanted to be in a famous rock band. It was reasonable to tell me that was highly unlikely. Unless your goals are like that, screw them and do what makes you happy.
Sorry you have to go through that. Try not to let it get to you, but retain the ability to recognize constructive criticism.
It might help to tell us what your goals are so we can judge for ourselves rather than just taking your word for it.
Very much the opposite, but probably because what I ended up doing follows their image of success. Become highly educated in a technical field and then make a decent amount of money (on paper, in this economy). Not sure I would have the same approval if I wanted to become, say, a graphic designer.
If so, they haven't told me.