Dear Smoke Monster...

BA,

Simple question:

I have all the best traits in the world to do with what I wish, but I'm not in a career and I'm single and that makes my parents unhappy. Do I drop my ambitions to see the world to find a career I don't want and meet a girl I have to drop my standards to be with just so I can be close by to a now happy set of parents? I mean, they did raise me. Pursuing my own ambitions seems to be selfish.

I don't know. Maybe it's not a question so much as it's a WTF moment.

-Lost


Dear Smoke Monster,
Oh yeah, that's definitely a great plan. Find yourself a mediocre relationship and an ok job and spend the rest of your life resenting your parents because you're only content. Spend your days in some cubicle wondering what your life could have been like if you'd done what you wanted to do. Settle for a very nice woman who frankly deserves someone who is totally enamored of her. Have a couple kids and perpetuate the "American dream."
Our parents are from a different era, where the thing to do was get a job and have Sunday dinner with your parents. (Alright, a fair share of them are hippies who HATE kids like that but clearly that's not what you're dealing with.) If that was what you wanted and it made you happy? That'd be awesome. But it's not. Maybe one day it will be what you want, but for right now, you're looking for more.
Yes, your parents raised you and you want them to be happy. That means they did a good job. But it's just as important to realize that they want you to be happy. And they DO NOT want you to have a midlife crisis where you leave your pretty nice wife, quit your pretty ok job, and decide that your calling in life is selling handmade keychains on the beach in Spain while you deny that you're going bald and wear clothes for a man twenty years younger. That's just sad.
Do your thing, if you can swing it (financially, etc). Better now than when you're aging and pathetic.
Solitarily yours,
Bitter Amanda