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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Mottizens: do you have a good relationship with your parents? More specifically: do you try to make them proud and live up to values they inculcated in you? Or do you think about failings they had, and try to orient your life toward avoiding those?
Found myself wondering about this yesterday, how in some cases you have children who strive to continue the sort of life their parents led (e.g., multigenerational families I see at church), and in other cases you get total rebellion, children who want to be as little like their parents as possible and adopt opposite positions to what they were raised with.
Thinking about my own case, it's a little bit strange in that it never felt like my parents steered me towards any particular mode of living. I try to be like my dad in certain respects: taking responsibility for things, trying to solve one's own problems with one's own resources, managing money carefully and thoughtfully. My mom is just sort of a pleasant, rather daffy woman who lives a very simple life and isn't trying to impact the world in any way. I observe that neither of them are especially opinionated, and neither am I; they are casual, moderate, Clinton-type liberals and I've gone more conservative, but it's not something we ever fight about - they don't go into arguments about "issues" and don't mind people disagreeing with them. In general it's like they're just sort in the middle of most types of bell curves; even if I were of some rebellious nature, they aren't polar enough about anything for me to take up the opposite pole.
That's... a complicated question that requires a bit of a backstory. In the 90's when the USSR went tits up everyone had to find a new job. My mom managed to make a switch and made a successful career in accounting; she retired this year. My dad did not. He could probably have been a good physicist (he's a MIPT graduate), but long story short, this didn't work out and he started working for various federal agencies, first in IT and then in legal. I don't know why he kept working there.
Anyway, this affected me in two ways. First is my attitude towards money. My mom, being the breadwinner, was in charge of the family budget and she's... very careful with spending. The word "discretionary" didn't exist in our lexicon. This attitude has rubbed off on me. I've gotten better (mostly due to having to compromise with my wife, who's a complete opposite, despite growing up in a much more restrictive financial situation), but I still enjoy bargain hunting too much and obsessively compare prices even of things that should be below my level of attention, like food and random shit from AliExpress. Buying something substantial for myself still feels like some kind of kinky pleasure to me.
The other aspect is masculinity. My dad was the voice of random knowledge (stereotypes about men are true), but not the voice of authority. He was quite capable, as a former amateur boxer and a man with a badge, of defending us in a pinch, but I never considered this as something worthy of emulating. Once again, I don't know why he chose the life of a zoo tiger for himself. Perhaps I should ask him. I guess living in a zoo can sound better than living in the wild: you get free meat, free healthcare, the only thing you surrender is your freedom of movement. Cats love it! I never even realized he himself found it stifling, until I learned some things a few years ago at a family gathering. My parents patched it up, but I think my dad has been completely housebroken by the experience.
The session of impromptu psychotherapy over, where does this leave me? Well, thank God for small mercies, I am in a situation where my own masculinity isn't often called into question. My wife's father died before we met, my only son has developmental issues, I don't have to deal with his neurotypical friends and his fathers. I have a career where my leadership is backed by my experience. My wife is a homemaker. I just need to find the nerve to kick the next tradie that gives me lip out of the house. I fucking sound like Bob Slocum.
Oh, and speaking of values, not driving anyone too hard. My parents didn't try to exploit my precociousness by sending me to a magnet school, enrolling me into seven different after-school classes, or forcing me to get into the MSU or the MIPT. I went to a regular school and delighted every teacher, went to a regular university and delighted every professor, got a regular job and delighted every boss. Maybe I сould've become a greater version of myself via something like 57th-MSU-Yandex, but do you really have to go all-in if you've been dealt a good hand?
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