Your mother will never understand why you left the career she was proud of. She will interpret your choice through the lens of her own fears about security, her own unfulfilled dreams, her own beliefs about what constitutes a life well-lived. You could spend hours explaining your reasoning, your values, your vision for your life. She will nod, perhaps even say she understands. But understanding and approval are different countries, and she lives in the latter while you’re asking her to visit the former.
Some part of you keeps trying anyway. Keeps hoping that if you just find the right words, the right framing, the right evidence of your thoughtfulness, she’ll suddenly see what you see. That she’ll recognize your choice as brave rather than reckless, as authentic rather than foolish, as growth rather than failure.
But her opinion isn’t formed by your arguments. It’s formed by who she is, what she’s experienced, what she fears, what she values, what she needs your life to mean in order for her life to make sense. You’re asking her to change not just her opinion of your choice, but the entire framework through which she understands what makes a life meaningful.
That framework took decades to build. Your words, no matter how carefully chosen, cannot dismantle it.
This is the brutal arithmetic of human judgment: people see you through themselves, not through you. Their opinion of your actions is a statement about their values, not an accurate assessment of your choices. Their approval or disapproval reveals what they need from the world more than it reveals anything about your worth.
Epictetus understood this with the clarity of someone who had experienced being property. As a slave, he was subject to constant judgment from people who had complete power over his circumstances but zero understanding of his inner life. They formed opinions about his character, his intelligence, his worth based entirely on their needs and prejudices.
If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument can you give to prove they should value logic? If someone doesn’t think learning is important, how can you argue that they should value education?
The answer is you cannot. People judge from within their existing framework, and you cannot argue someone out of a framework they didn’t argue themselves into.
Your mother’s disapproval of your career change isn’t really about your career. It’s about her relationship with security, status, and conventional success. Changing her opinion would require changing those fundamental orientations, which is work only she can do, if she ever chooses to do it at all.
You cannot make her see what you see. You can only decide whether her inability to see it will determine your choices.
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Most of us make a catastrophic error: we believe other people’s opinions are mirrors that reflect our actual worth. When someone judges us harshly, we assume the judgment reveals a flaw in us. When someone admires us, we assume the admiration confirms our value. We outsource our self-assessment to people who barely know us, who see us through distorting lenses, who are often wrong about their own lives and certainly wrong about ours.