The way we are conditioned in the formative years of our versus how our own reality shapes up to be can be starkly different. In my case, my father was the one with a career while mother stayed at home and took care of everything else. It took me into the middle of high school to full dissociate my expectations from life from that of my mother. I would study engineering like my father had and enter the workforce much as he had back in the day. Once that expectation was reset, I might have imagined the flow of my career to resemble his and other like him that I knew.
That meant being somewhat lost for the first five or ten years after college trying to find the thing that would become the job to grow and retire from. My father had friends who immigrated to America around that ten year mark, some sooner than that. Other, changed jobs until their kids needed stability in the school environment. There was a point just about everyone "settled" into a career. This was the pattern with my older cousins who entered the workforce upto a decade before me. So when it is my time to settle and I find myself grappling with a job market that has changed beyond recognition from the last time I was hyper-active on it, I find myself dealing with a lot of inner turmoil.
I have to ask myself how it came to be that the playbook got appended for me. Then there is the business of accepting that reality and making peace with it - which may take a while for me. And then if I am smart enough, I would see and seize the opportunity that it opens up. The early conditioning seems to make all of that difficult and makes me wonder if it is for the best when a young person grows up without any kind of role model to anchor to - because it forces them to forge their own path in life and be accepting of all consequences that brings.
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