So my Dad decided to sit me down and lecture me on a few things. It took almost an hour and this is what I summed up.
tldr;
we are embarrassed and disappointed in you, but we don’t want to come out and say it
wake up earlier
finishing school early is worth the extra few thousand dollars
i’m a terrible son for being independent
my dad consider’s driving 2 times a week to a factory and vacuuming the house everyday to be the hardest job on the face of the earth
oh, and white people are racist and won’t ever hire asians
truthfully, there were a few useful nuggets of information in the lecture. but in reality, they were a little too late. I could have used that advice 4 years ago.
Reality is a tough thing to deal with it seems. My dad has to live with his failed business that rocked our family in the new millennium. My mom has a deadbeat dad that should be putting his ego aside and finding an easy minimum wage job to help out the family, and she ends up working 10x more than my dad every single godamn day.
Of course for me I have to deal with the harsh realities of my own personal life. My dad and mom are old. They want retirement. They probably won’t be around in 20 years or longer. That makes me sad. Maybe there are things I should have said when I was younger. i always believed that my parents had a terrible budgeting system, and that they should have saved more. I had gotten use to the lifestyle where all they did was save (our bankruptcy days), and we spent little or no money on anything. If we had continued that trend, instead of all the ridiculous purchases and investments we made in the past, we could have actually had enough for their retirement. But alas, I don’t know too much about what they do with their money and it’s not my place to say anything.
It’s just funny how life is. You start as a child, wide eyed thinking you can become anything in the world. And then slowly but surely reality seeps in and you start seeing doors be closed. You can’t do this, you can’t do that. It’s not feasible or logical to get into this or go do that. You don’t have requirements to do this, or the funding to do that. Your choices start to become limited and all the bullshit in the world about unlimited potential and choices start to fade. And then you realize your family has been bankrupt for the better half of their life, and that you really have no money saved up. You’re drowning in debt from university and you don’t know what the future holds.
That’s the fucking truth, and that’s life. I have many regrets in life, but I truly believe that there’s nothing I could have done about it.
So what is there left to do? Enjoy a sub-par mediocre lifestyle and never think about the dreams and riches that you had as a child. Life is what it is.