Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

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> Parental guidance is often the source of the issue: you convince yourself your dream is to be a good student to please or impress your parents, teachers, friends, bosses.

That sounds like a different issue. By parental guidance, I mean offering your experience and resources as a parent to the child to help them model their world. For example, if my kid came to me and said their goal is to make and sell clay art full time, then I would not dissuade them. I would, however, ask them if they have other goals like buying a nice house or living in a certain area or attracting a certain type of spouse, and let them know of the various probabilities of that. A parent is a cabinet member, the kid is still the president.

> This means focusing on what you like to do instead of being miserable being someone you're not.

The purpose of my original comment was to point out that most people do not have the luxury of not being miserable just because they do not want to be. A plumber does not spend time in crawl space because they like to. But the plumber has multiple goals, and compromises have to be made to accomplish various portions of various goals. Such as not being able to do what you like to do for x hours a week, but in exchange, you get a high probability of being able to feed and house your family to your acceptable standards. And then having a couple days a week where you do get to “be someone you want to be”.

Yes, it is important to try and teach your kids that compromising is part of life, that you can't always get what you want, and that you should try to secure financial security before 'shooting for the stars'. But parents alone don't do everything. I feel our whole society is strangely wired to tell people to follow their dreams, not to listen to naysayers, etc. Try telling kids that they'll have to do mindnumbing tiring shit 5 days a week to be able to afford 2 days of rest where they can be 'someone they want to be' is a losing proposition.

I'd feel better as a parent if they liked a lot of stuff (manual, intellectual, artistic, helping, electronics, clothes, cooking, selling, building, repairing, teaching), had an open mind and excellent work ethic, so that when they find themselves doing any job, they'll try to excel, find something in it, and 'be who they want to be' in their job too. Office politics, the way you treat others, helping colleagues, improving your skills, taking responsibilities, being a responsible and helpful member of a team or a society, keeping ethics standards high... You name it. They can also be achieved through work, while not really being fond of what you're doing. CPA, blue collar jobs (or plumber for you) don't seem to be dream careers, but there's many opportunities to be a productive, impactful, helpful and happy member of society while working those.

What makes plumber not a dream career?

I think there’s a lot of bias and assumption about what people want behind your comment.

No assumption about what people want, I just cited back GP's career example. My point was about finding something you're happy with in any setting, and to 'be who you want to be' whatever job you chose or choses you...

And, to be clear, most of my family and ancestry have been manual workers, laborers, in construction, fields, and they all wished dearly for us never to have to work such jobs. Maybe it's their bias, and even though they probably liked their jobs, may have some better insight (than me or you) as to why they wouldn't want their children to go the same way. My family always smirks at the modern romantic vision of manual work. 'if you have a chance to stay behind a desk doing intellectual work why would you ever want for shit working conditions, outside in the cold or heat, or doing something that breaks your body'. Their bias, doing the work is 'do something else if you can'... Who am I to say I know their life better than them?

And yes, CPA is a great career too for them. Just not anything back-breaking if they can convince you otherwise. And if you like the manual stuff, they're ready to have you take up the family business! They'll open all the doors for you. But they'll worry for you.

It may be strange, as the manual-job part of the family is far wealthier than us engineers or diploma-ridden grand-children, but they still think we're better like this...

That may be a 'stupid' view from a build-multi-generational-wealth perspective, but we're mostly 2 generations removed from starving farmers, so knowledge work seems better from their life. I only wish they'd have been as serious about teaching us practical skills and construction, home maintenance and all their manual skills, as teaching their work-ethics (Portuguese descent here, may be different in other cultures I don't know).

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