The Courage To Disappoint Your Family

How many of you live in rural and urban places where people force or talk you into following the traditional path for career, marriage, and life?

I remember when it was the last day of my graduation; I could barely keep my feet on the ground with excitement for the life ahead, but one friend looked sad. College was her fun break from the traditions and stern boundaries imposed by her family. I didn’t understand at first; It was incredible because I couldn’t understand how someone could be sad on a day our shackles were finally off; well, college’s over. One month later, her parents got her married.

Back in my days, people around me viewed medicine and engineering as the only fields worth pursuing; That’s rather harsh; Perhaps I am exaggerating. Didn’t we truly have no options? In the locality, other fields are unexplored. The job demands and pay are low. But it’s a loop; there are no budding artists here, so there are no art galleries. But again, does your small town pay you a decent wage? Opportunities spread out across the planet. Anyway, you are getting out of town for that engineering job. For the knowledge your elders lack, you gotta shrink your choices. That’s how it is.

Photo by Sami Aksu

It’s difficult to thrive against traditions and customs. However pointless or meaningless you find it, you gotta churn the same milk. You might be considered selfish if you break the custom, as you put the whole pack of people who expected you to follow in the discomfort that comes with change. You falling apart from the crew would risk their comfort. You shatter their carefully arranged structure and safety. Your whole family would go through a crisis just because you took a voice acting job over that HR job.

They don’t trust you with choices. Sometimes they are right because, following the customs from childhood, our minds are not trained to choose and think wisely about our own interests and the world. So if they ever test us with choices, we may suck. But that is not always the case; we have our own experiences and knowledge gathered from school culture, teachers, classmates, and some great people in the neighborhood. We compete with the students beyond the small town through the syllabus regulated across the state or country. Every generation grows up with experiences their parents never had.

In some families and regions, even where the money is not a problem, tradition asks you to get a job instead of studying further. Some families discuss it with you but end up manipulating you.

We can’t blame them completely. They only know how far they explored, so they fear that if you go too far, they can’t help you. They aren’t the special ones; they just got away from poverty; they are just settling. Of course, they will be scared to death when you spill that you wanna be an indie filmmaker.

But we still wish to fight.

During your journey, at times, your bold choices will wear you out. You will doubt if you’d have been better off following the tradition.

For those fighters, let me share some wise words that keep me going.

From the philosopher and politician John Stuart Mill,

“A society that forces its members to embrace custom and convention is likely to fall into a

stultifying conformity, depriving itself of the energy and vitality that prompt social improvement.”

In the book ‘Justice’, Michael Sandel writes,

“Conformity, in Mill’s account, is the enemy of the best way to live.”

Traditions and customs are not just present in the countryside, it may be sitting right in front of your nose. If we are falling into traditions, I guess we just gotta get a little brave.