I used to hold a quiet grudge against my parents for the way they handled my creative dreams.
It wasn’t the kind of loud, dramatic grudge that shows up at therapy and needs a name. It was more like a low hum in the background of my ambitions. It was a recurring thought that quietly whispered: They didn’t believe in me.
They knew of my love of writing. They saw the journals I filled, the essays that came back marked with glowing commentary from my teachers, and the stories that I’d start and never quite finish. Their response was essentially: that’s cute, but what’s your real plan?
“Go get a master’s in early childhood education,” they advised. “So you can teach. Or better yet, law school so you can be well-paid and respectable.”
My creative writing talent wasn’t something they could see me turning into a career, so they looked away from it. I resented that for a long time — until I became a parent.
When my kid went to college, my feelings got complicated
Decades later, I sent my firstborn off to an expensive liberal arts college to major in film studies, and that grudge got a bit more complicated.
I have spent nearly two decades pouring intentionally into my child’s development. There were the Mandarin immersion programs, piano lessons, and summer workbooks, a grade level ahead, all carefully cultivating their unique sense of self. I wanted them to know that their interests mattered. I wanted them to feel they were allowed and encouraged to follow what lit them up. I said it explicitly, and I meant every word.
But now I’m sitting with the liberal arts tuition bills next to the economic reports of millions of jobs disappearing, and the daily AI takeover alerts.
I finally understand what my parents were thinking when I went off to college back in 1999.
My parents had done the math
They weren’t dream killers, but time travelers. They were standing in my present, looking ahead to my future, and doing the math that I was too young and hopeful to do myself. Now here I am doing the same math except the numbers are scarier, and the variables have multiplied in ways none of us saw coming.
It’s not just the job market I’m watching. It’s the wholesale dismantling of creative industries by artificial intelligence. I think about my child studying film while screenwriting rooms go dark, entry-level editing jobs evaporate, and graphic designers, photographers, and copywriters quietly lose relevance to tools that work for free and never sleep.
The very field my child is pouring their passion into is being restructured in real time, faster than any syllabus can keep up with. I find myself wondering: Are the professors teaching the industry that exists, or the one that existed? Are film classes in 2026 preparing my kid for the future or elegantly preserving the past?
My father graduated from college before his profession was invented
I think about my father, who got his electrical engineering degree in 1971. The computer systems he would eventually spend his career managing did not exist yet when he was sitting in those lectures. He was studying for a future he couldn’t fully see.
I studied English and History, majors that seemed, on paper, equally impractical, right up until social media rewrote the rules, and handed a girl with the gift for language a whole new kind of career. Neither of us could have studied our way directly into what we became.
I don’t have a clean answer. What I’m learning in real time is that good parenting in an era of radical uncertainty might just be the refusal to let your fears become hand-me-downs you pass on to your child. That lesson is costing me bandwidth I don’t have. It is one more weight on the already heavy bar of midlife, where caregiving, career, and reinvention all compete for the same depleted reserves.
And so I meditate, do my breathwork, enjoy my sound baths, and pray. I pray my child will forge something I can’t picture yet, the way my father built systems that didn’t exist in his textbooks, and the way I built a business on platforms that launched after my graduation.
I pray the instinct to bet on yourself and answer the deep inner call that tugs at your heart turns out to be the one thing no algorithm can replicate.
