The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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My mother has constantly been angry and aggressive since her menopause last year. I do not like shit tests coming from my mother, not the kind where the only solution is not talking to her. My dad has an incredibly short temper and would berate me for flunking high school (I still cleared the nationwide entrance tests and high school exams with literally perfect grades, being featured in the newspapers because of it). Every day he would scream at me for having flunked exams and this went on for at least 2 years until I started uni. I have to bear it from both my parents now who expect me to have a stable income while building something of my own. To them, the perfect life is of a bugman code coolie. I may have fucked up but I still went to uni without having to stay back a class. Some here would remember my posts in 2019 about trying to transfer over to the US and how my family actively sabotaged it, now whenever news of a kid getting a scholarship to some big-name uni comes up, my mom talks about it loudly as to call me a loser, even though I had zero money to even write exams, forget about hiring consultants like other kids who go out do here. Then after I argued about it, she told me that I would have failed and I got what I deserved.
I love my family, they have sacrificed everything they could have to raise me and my sibling but they are overprotective and abusive to the point where I do not wish to share a roof with them ever again. Calling me a has-been failure at age 23 (will be 24 this July) is not fun. My family suffered a lot due to bullshit court cases resulting in the loss of most of our ancestral land to legal limbo which my family sunk a lot of money into. I get why they feel the way they do yet they cannot change at this point, I should leave soon. I have not told them when I am leaving, the ticket is for June 3rd, and I want to leave without telling them about it. Have never travelled in my life since they have always been overprotective.
The shit tests are fairly constant. I started working out more seriously and saw my clothes shrink a little. I did gain some inches on my waist by forced overeating from MMA but my ma just keeps calling me fat, telling me that I am going to be fat whilst herself being really obese. Everyone in my family is overweight except me and she somehow always calls me fat whenever the topic of my clothes comes up.
My grandad is 91 and his room is in the section of the house where my study is so I am constantly being asked to run errands, pointless ones, it fucks my work up since I have to constantly start over and over again. Even worse is that my parents don't let me sleep because my work hours are late and they wake me up at 9 am so I average 5 hours of sleep a night. Any disagreement results in them screaming at me again and telling me that I will fail at my startup too. At this point, they are more convinced of me being a failure than anyone else I know of. Not saying that they want me to but this behaviour has always been a constant in my life. The only metric that mattered ever was fucking stupid exams, that produce their tier code coolies for the West which is what universities in my nation are in all honesty.
I will be leaving for the large metropolis this Monday to meet with my cofounders and start serious work on my startup. One is based there and makes a good living doing a bunch of programming stuff and the other is a child prodigy of sorts who has many job offers whilst studying as an undergrad in the US. The one living there has a large apartment so we will be working out of it until we get our service apartments 5 minutes from his place, still using his home office as our primary workplace. I am the non-tech guy here for now since we need a lot of front-end and back-end infra up and running so I will have to take care of marketing, sales, hiring, communication etc and I am worried that I might get kicked out or the startup may fail. I have never had anything good happen to me over a long time and I feel quite scared.
I will keep writing more ML code, meditating and figuring out how focusing works properly since my work hours will be gruelling. I am just tired, I have no one to share any of this with, I could not share my feelings with my family earlier which is why I started posting here and now I can never share how I feel about anything with them or anyone. For now, I feel alone, with no safety nets.
I'mma be real with you, I find your plan kinda terrifying. I'm about to leave my job to embark on a startup-esque project, but I've got a decade of work experience under my belt, a cash runway of between 1-2 years, and both substantial passive income and lucrative part time contracting opportunities with the employer I'm leaving. You don't need that to start a startup, there's a middle ground to be found, but were I in your shoes, I'd be looking to move out to a place where I'd nabbed a stable 9-5, and I would grind it out no matter much I hated it until I had more security. Your living situation is intolerable, but it's very likely that your startup will fail, most do, be sure you have an income to fall back on if it does. Good luck though. I've been following your updates for what feels like years now and while I may disagree with a lot of your thought processes and decisions, I think you're a bright guy and I'm rooting for you.
I can't do stable. My life's biggest regrets are not working hard enough and still lucking into good places.
If it fails, I'll use my computer skills and get a job with my Co founders. I have a safety net of a stable well paying job but that can only materialise if I go through with this.
I wish you luck for your journey too. People fail though the one big regret many have is not doing something sooner and to the best of one's ability. For the first time in my life I can avoid that and that gives me peace.
Hey, as long as you're fed and free and your heart is still hungry, you've got another chance to take a shot at the goal. Make sure that you document what you achieve at this job so you can show what you've done with your time if it falls through. It's terrifying to step out on your own for the first time, especially with an unsupportive family and no resources, but you've got smarts and grit on your side, as long as you make good decisions you'll build something from the ether. Best of luck!
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Why does it need to be a start-up? Start-ups have an inherently high failure even for highly competent people. You really need to have a good safety net.
Otherwise I agree, you need to get out. Nobody can stand such treatment very long.
My safety net is getting a good remote job if it fails. As long as I know a computer skill and have the help of my Co founders, I can get a good paying job.
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I'm always wary about reading too much into any story I only get one side of. But you deserve and will benefit from having people around you that support you, and you have no obligation to stick with people who sabotage you, even if they are your parents.
Being alone with no safety net can be daunting but it can also be very freeing and enlightening. I am currently living far away from my own friends and family. It's nothing to be scared of. As a 23 year old, there's nothing you can't learn to do or adapt to.
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You need to move out.
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