What Life Did Your Parents Want for You? What Life Did You Want for Yourself? What Life Are You Living?
And are you happy with your choices?
Paid subscribers, listen to the audio version of this article - narrated by me - here
Sometimes a comment lands in my comments section that is so good, it sparks a whole article. Like the title of this particular mailout which came from fellow Substackian
who writes My Weird and Wonderful Life.Patricia and I are doing a bit of an exchange of ideas this week. I’m going to answer the question she posed me in the above title, then she’s going to respond with her own post on the topic.
To get Patricia’s response, you can find her Substack here.
What our parents want from us vs. what we actually ended up doing is such a universal topic and I’m sure you have your own opinions, so feel free to add to the conversation in the comments section. We’d love to hear your stories.
What life did your parents want for you?
Like many of my fellow suburbanite, middle-class Millennials, what my parents wanted from me was both very specific and very nebulous. It went something like this.
Go to school and get good grades.
Go to a good University and get a degree.
Get a “good” job.
Get married, have kids.
Ideally, all of this would be done and dusted by my mid-twenties. After that, their intentions for me became more blurry, presumably because they felt their job was largely done. Something about not living on the poverty line and not doing much other than working and the odd vacation until retirement.
It is the quintessential baby boomer blueprint, the one they inherited from their parents, albeit with a bit more education thrown in. And it seemed that it was the plan for all of my age group across the Western world. My husband’s was the same, as were many of my friends and acquaintances.
To give them their dues, my parents were better than some. They were happy for me to play to my strengths at school (that was English, of course) and they weren’t especially worried about what the “good” job was so long as it paid enough for me to support myself. And I’m grateful for that - too many people I know had parents who would only be happy if they became say a lawyer or a doctor.
But it was still a very restrictive plan, one borne partly from their fear of poverty (both of them grew up poor) and partly from their upbringing which dictated that marriage and kids was the only personal path you could tread.
I thought I’d nicely adhere to the plan until I asked for a yearly subscription to the National Geographic for my 16th birthday. Suddenly, my North Wales home felt very small indeed. There was much looking out of the window and sighing and scribbled notes in my diary about how desperate I was to leave and travel the world.
But I’m also a people pleaser and very competitive so I did the academic thing and finished school with an offer for one of the best Universities in the UK where I spent three years wishing I was somewhere else (even if you’re good at something it doesn’t mean it’s right for you).
I got married at 24. Thankfully that part worked great, even 14 years later.
I settled into a 9-5 in which I assumed I would “work my way up”, and cried on the toilet every morning with how bored I was.
What did I want for myself?
I didn’t know. But by my mid-twenties, I knew it wasn’t what I had.
I wasn’t the only one. So many people I know drifted through their parents’ plans for them only to end up having a quarter-life crisis when they discover what they were told they should want isn’t what they want.
Parents want what is “best” for their kids but half the time, they don’t really know what that means. So they revert to societal norms like that office job, marriage, and kids.
But humans are too complex and individual for billions of us to live the very same way.
I was one of those who didn’t want that life but I didn’t do anything about it until I turned 27. It was only then that I started to even consider the question:
What do I really want for myself?
and
Am I prepared to put up with the disapproval of people around me to get it?
It turns out, I was.
So I burned my life to the ground and started again.
What life are you living?
I’ve talked about the nuts and bolts of this before. I left London and my 9-5, opened a wine store and bar in a small English fishing town, built it into a business worth selling, sold it, as well as my house, and everything I own, and headed into the traveling sunset for the last 2.5 years whilst owning approximately 135 possessions.
10 years of life in one sentence.
The specifics are not really the point here. What is more important is that the life I am living now is one that is lived intentionally.
It all started with a handshake, one my husband and I made when we committed to opening our wine store.
I was 27 years old. Since then - I’m now 38 - I’ve tried to live every part of my life with intention. Every choice, every purchase, every decision, from that handshake until now, I’ve tried to make with thought, care, and attention.
Which means the life I want to live is the one I now live.
It’s not always perfect and I’m sure at some point, what I want will change. And I’ll make sure that change happens.
None of it comes easy. It takes a hefty FU attitude to live even just a smidgen different from the norm and the life my parents wanted for me. It’s years of building habits saying no and creating healthy boundaries. It takes willpower that I didn’t even know I possessed.
Thankfully, my parents turned out to be far more supportive of my life than I expected. My father doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on anyway - he took me and my family to Romania in 1990 when I was just five years old. We all know where I get my desire to travel from.
And my mother often says she understands now that college isn’t the only path to a good life.
I get it - for her and my father, college was the only way to climb out of their poverty-stricken childhood.
But times have changed.
And my parents have changed with it.
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Are you happy with your choices?
I don’t particularly believe in the pursuit of happiness these days. Happiness is such a fleeting thing - a buzz, not a sustainable mindset.
The answer is, most of the time I’m good. I’m more content than before, despite my anxiety and low self-esteem (I’m working on them and that helps too).
Happiness isn’t the aim here.
Living intentionally is, because that means you regularly question your life. Once you do that, you can begin to make choices based on what you want, not what society wants for you.
Those choices will change over the course of your life but living intentionally means you can roll with those changes as they arise.
Even through the bad times, living intentionally beats sitting on the toilet every morning crying over a life chosen for you.
Take it from me.
As my friends start to have children, I’ve noticed a difference in their parenting styles from their own parents. They’re less scared of what will happen if they don’t push their kid down the traditional path.
Every generation wants something different for their children from what they had. And parent-child dynamics mean our kids will probably rebel against whatever we put in front of them, even if that is total freedom.
But I’m hopeful that as opportunities to bring children up in different ways become more and more normalized, we can have a better, more intentional relationship with our kids.
One that means they have a shot at living an intentional life themselves.
Have you joined Substack’s “Notes” yet?
There’s been a buzz here this week - Substack has just launched a Twitter-style social media platform exclusively for Substack members. And that includes you.
I’ve been using “Notes” for three days and I can tell ya - it’s pretty fun over there. Less toxic than Twitter, less addictive than TikTok, less algorithmic than Instagram. Join the conversation here.
Reading for the weekend
My most recent Medium articles (paywall free)
To Live Simply Is to Live Differently and That’s Terrifying. Here’s How to Make It…Not
As a Sommelier, Here Is Everything (Else) We Wish People Knew About Wine
THANKS FOR READING!
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