I wish you good luck in escaping their influence.

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.

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.

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”

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.

My parents are constantly pushing me to own a car.

I have a license because it is a convenient all-in-one piece of ID. I abstain from car ownership because cars fucking suck. They’re expensive to buy, expensive to insure, expensive to maintain, expensive to run, expensive to drive, and you can’t even use your phone* while going places. Car ownership is just overall a bad deal. I’m much happier taking public transit, even if it sucks ass and is twice as slow to get anywhere.

*If you unironically counter this point you should be prevented from ever getting behind a wheel for the rest of your life. Fuck you for putting my and other people’s lives in danger for your own convenience.

I’m constantly getting pressured to run on the corporate hamster wheel. I’m so over that life!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

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.

@drbollocks very regular goals in my opinion