the zurkie show - your parents aren't living your life

Episode Date: December 27, 2025

If you want to be your own person, you will have to go against the standards other people have set for you.and yes, that means your parents.they might know what's best for them...that doesn't mean it's right for you.sending you all lots of love and peaaaaaaaace!https://linktr.ee/thezurkieshow

What if your parents' opinion of you is actually a really bad thing? And it's holding you back. And it's making your life way more miserable than it needs to be. And instead of you being able to spread your wings like a golden eagle from Dutch Bros, you instead feel like you are a failure. Even though you haven't even lived most of your life, you're young, you're ambitious, but you have convinced and drilled into your mind that you will never be as perfect as your parents want you to be. what do you do?

Well, their opinion will always stay the same. No matter what happens, I want you to realize that you will not be able to change your parents' mind if they have their mind already made up about who you need to be, what you need to do, how you need to live your life, what job you need to have, what school you need to go to. That won't change. Now, I understand that parental approval is very important. And for a lot of us, we spend our entire life chasing after our dad just giving us a pat on a back and saying, hey, good job, man.

You did good. But if you're not going to receive that by doing the things that you genuinely want to do for yourself, what is the point in bending over backwards for your family? And it's hard because for some of us, it's in our, it's just in our culture that our elders, our family, they have priority in terms of our life, like our own life. They are the ones that dictate the choices that tell us what med school we need to go to, even who we need to elope with. But I just want you to understand that this will hold you back. I spent a lot of my adolescent life chasing after what I thought other people wanted of me, especially my parents.

Even though my parents were never that prescy in terms of, you need to get this kind of job. You need to go to this kind of school. Like they were very, very supportive of me trying different things and just going out and giving it a shot. I, for some reason, had drilled it into my mind that I wanted to be successful for them.

Now, in terms of what successful means, for me, it was retiring my parents, buying them an awesome, you know, car and like being able to put the tap to pay when we would go out to dinner, you know, and just like, I'm rolling in the dough. but my parents don't care about any of that.

They want me to be happy. And I have that luxury. I'm very blessed for that. You might not have that same reality. Maybe your parents are putting a lot of pressure on you. Maybe you're an immigrant child. You're the golden child. And your parents remind you how much they sacrificed to come to this country,

the best country on earth, and make something happen. and you're realizing as a young adult that a lot of the dreams you were promised as a young kid, they've been stripped away from all of us. And groceries are $200 a week. It's a weird reality because even though we are experiencing one thing, we are having trouble finding someone to date in our hometown that doesn't just want to have a casual thing. We are having a hard time finding a job, which is. is for a lot of us the reason we go to school. And our parents are still chirping, saying,

well, you have to be successful, man. What's wrong with you? They will never understand you. I'm sorry. Your parents will just never understand you. And I think that you have to realize that your relationship is that of you're their kid. And that's it. And it's okay. You don't need to be their best friend. You don't need to be somebody that has something to prove to them all the time. You can be kind, you can be courteous, but if your parents are getting in the way of you growing as a human being, understand where the boundary is set. Because if you will spend the rest of your life trying to appease your parents, you will realize that you have never lived your own life. Things are feeling a little less human these days, aren't they? But isn't the whole point of

progress to make things more human. That's why, at TD, when we design a product, whether it's an app for making trading easier or monitoring your account for fraud, we ask one simple question. How does this help people? That's how we're making banking more simple, more seamless, and more intuitive. But most importantly, that's how TD is making banking more human. You will never live it because you will be so focused on pleasing everything they say and it will it will domino into every facet of your life imagine a future

where you find a partner that you really like you find a guy during a you know a backpacking trip in italy and he's so suave and he has a great sense of you know great music taste or whatever and he loves to dress in those like cardigan sweaters and you're in love with him and you bring him to your parents and your parents they have a vision of you marrying some kind of nice southern boy or i don't know they have like they want you to be with i don't know hedge fund billionaire son right they're gonna dog on your choice as long as long as you're happy sweetie but it's your life it's not their life and i think that that is something we forget time and time again especially now that we are you know as a generation living with our parents longer

you are going to butt heads with your parents naturally, especially if they come from a world of sacrifice and they come from a world of scarcity. And you can look at them and judge them for it, but then again, your parents are doing the best with what they had. And for a lot of them growing up, maybe they just didn't understand that you could one day have a career in something that's more risky.

Maybe they didn't understand that you can go to school and study something you really love. because you are going to find a way to make that your entire life's mission. It's easier said than done because I'm sure you've tried to convince your folks of something. You've tried to please them at Thanksgiving dinner or now Christmas dinner, right, being like, hey, like guys, I'm doing great actually. You know, I have a couple people buying my art and like my literature club is going good. And they're like, you went to nursing school, get a nursing job.

It will make you feel like a failure. The bar needs to be set by you. What I've noticed is that sometimes our parents want to help a little too much. They want us to be a little too safe. And when they notice that we don't have enough evidence and enough confidence in the thing that we're doing for ourselves, they instead want to overstretch their hands and be like, hey, wait, you could do consulting. Hey, you could work for me. You could do this thing.

But in reality, figuring out what you're going to do for the rest of your life, as an 18 to 30 year old does not happen in 24 hours. It takes a decade. It takes time. It takes failure. And if you are already telling yourself that you will never be good enough for something, then you won't do anything. You won't do anything about it. You will sit there and just be like I'm cooked. genuinely that is what's going to happen. And I'm telling you this because I know, because that was my outlook on my life. I became so just doomed

in terms of my decision making. I started living in the past. I started regretting the fact that I didn't study harder. I didn't get into a better university and that I was like, you know, just playing around and I wasn't taking anything seriously. But what I wasn't realizing in that moment was that I was devoting a lot of my time towards my passions and towards things that maybe in the moment weren't going to bring me any opportunities or pay for my, you know, $30 matcha.

But I kept going down that path and eventually I got opportunities that I was able to use the skills I got for my passions. My parents didn't see that, though, when I went home from college because I didn't get an internship because I procrastinated on applying. and I devoted all of my time into learning editing softwares and animation softwares. They didn't understand that. They were kind of just like, well, he's doing his own thing. And they were very grateful, you know, very gracious in terms of that. But your parents might just not understand your path in life. And that is okay.

They don't need to. They don't need to. Same thing with your friends. They might be telling you, why are you not playing basketball, bro? You are six, seven, literally, you should be a power forward. You should be dunking. But if your heart is not in it, you won't do it. And you might, you know, have a lot of criticism and a lot of people telling you, man, like, you are really missing out.

But again, it's your life. It's your life. Zerki, what do I do to stop feeling like a failure? Because now I'm at a point where I just feel like I've cooked my own life. I feel so terrible about all of the circumstances that I've been dealt. Maybe you're in debt. Maybe you feel like you had a great girlfriend, boyfriend, boyfriend, partner. You fumbled them.

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Via Rail, love the way. Admit that you're a failure. Just admit it. Because what you are going to do is the more that you sit there and you'll be like, oh, man, I might be a failure and you're worrying about it. It could be solved with you just saying,

I failed. I failed. I didn't take my school seriously enough. I failed. I had an opportunity for a job lined up out of college. I didn't take it because I was just lazy. I failed. You didn't text her back.

you failed you failed now what we did the pitying we're upset but that does not change our life it doesn't we're still here we're still going to have to wake up tomorrow we're still going to have to buy a 30 dollar match still going to have to read feminist literature while we're outside of the coffee shop we're still going to have to do these things so now it's a decision can you accept the fact that you failed? Not only that, can you admit it? That you weren't perfect. That you were not this idea of what your parents wanted you to be

and that you actually hate your job and you want to change it. Or that you despise college. And you don't have any friends. And you feel like this whole thing that was sold to you on a platter of adulthood is actually kind of a skimass. It's a scam. Parts of it. And the reality of it

is nobody cares. Nobody cares. And that is such a beautiful, freeing thing. Because you are the person that is putting the weight on failure when in reality, everyone fails.

Everyone fails, man. I have failed more than I have succeeded. I have taken more L's than I've taken Ws, okay? You are not alone in that. There is nobody with a perfect track record. What if we reframed it? Instead of I am a failure, what if we say I failed?

And instead of having this cloud of sadness above our heads as we go through this life that we get one of. It's like confirmed one. Why would we waste our time mulling over the things that we failed? And instead, why wouldn't we spend that time figuring out where it went wrong and vowing not to repeat that pattern? But Zirk, that is difficult. And that is why exactly you need to do it.

When you admit that you're a failure or that you failed, because that's really what you're admitting, It's like nobody's a failure or like a success. It's all perspective. Someone who's successful in one person's eyes that, you know, is obsessed with being with as many partners as you can be with, right? They're going to look at someone that's like, you know, a Chad that's, you know, going through and hooking up with everybody. But maybe that guy who's doing that is actually really sad. And he's doing all of that to get back at the one girl in high school that broke his heart.

right you don't know it's all perspective it's all depending on who is looking so if we look at it that way that allows us to have an open field of perspective on our own lives so yes maybe the fact that you went to school you graduated with something that you don't really care for now that could from one perspective of your own mind be a failure but for another you can reframe it into wait a minute. I'm glad I did that time. I'm glad that I tried this thing. Now I have the freedom to change. I can still support myself from this degree, but I don't need to stay in this. I don't have to make this my entire personality. I can pivot. And there's nothing wrong with that. But again, that is a very uncomfortable thing to do when you have convinced yourself that no matter

what you do moving forward, you will fail and you will not succeed. That's the mindset we got to change. If everything is going to be bad in our minds, everything will play out in that way. We will carry that energy into whatever action we're doing. If we think that we are immediately going to get rejected when we go up to somebody at a coffee shop and we think that they have a cute hat and we want to talk to them and just be their friend, then we are going to go in with a losing attitude. Oh, and you're going to find things to distract yourself from trying. You will. You will find that that person, they have one air, you know, AirPod in and they're on

their computer and I shouldn't go up to them and I shouldn't, you know, bother them. You're going to find that, well, what if they don't like me because I don't know, I'm a guy and it's weird going up to them. The what ifs destroy the, oh, this is what happened. Because if you live in the what ifs, you create a reality that is comfortable for whatever perspective that you have. You create a reality that is just a cradle. And you're sucking on your thumb. Like a baby.

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I don't think it has. Because if it did help you and it did kind of like make you strong like you want to believe it did and you know, it also makes you more realistic about the world,

you wouldn't be so upset about yourself. You wouldn't. But instead, you are disappointed in yourself in the person that you are. And I see that. I can feel that.

People can see that and feel that when they interact with somebody that's just given up. That is chained by whatever their parents think of them. You hear it. You can just sense it. It's in the way of how you talk about things. If somebody asks you, oh, would you ever try playing pickleball? No, no. My dad always said I was better at soccer.

I would never try that. No, not what your dad said. Do you think you could play pickleball? That's my question. I mean, I don't know. I've never tried it. That's your answer. It's not that, well, somebody told me that and therefore. That has nothing to do with anything. And it is so easy to latch on to these things. They're little monkey bars that allow you to kind of balance, you know, yourself and make you feel like, oh, well, I have a sense of self. I know who I am. Why? Why close that entirely? Why not just be an open vessel for whatever might happen? Well, because, Growing up, I was told that I was more of like, you know, a Windows kid.

Well, screw it. I got the Mac bracelet on right now. Come on. You don't have to be in one box. You never do. You never will have to do that. Unless you choose it for yourself. Then you will forever stay that way.

And you will forever experience a life where you just are defined by what your parents think. The solution is building evidence for yourself. The solution is finding things that make you very uncomfortable, but are things that excite you and doing them over and over and over again. And you will hate it. You will hate it. I promise you because it's not comfortable. And for a lot of us, we love comfort. This is our entire world now is all around comfort. If you don't want to talk to somebody, you don't need to. You can get food delivered. you can exist, you can watch the best entertainment in the world at your fingertips, you can also get intimate with an AI chatbot. The world is built in a way to keep you in comfort. And you know what else is comfortable? Subscribing to the beliefs that your parents have already built for you.

On their own insecurities, on their own regrets, on their own things that they wish they did differently. of course, unfortunately, they're going to push that on to you. They will. And sometimes they might not even know it. They might just do it.

And it's up to you to kind of sort out the word salad of, why don't you work harder at school so you can get a good job and be like your brother who's going to Yale this year? And it's like, bro, like, chill. Whoa. Another underrated hack. You can say no.

But saying no to your parents is complicated. Because if your parents are like, we're going to kick you out of the house, then you might have to kind of play along and do your little puppet dance and be like, yes, dad, I love school and it's great. You know, hey, it's cool. As soon as you get out of that world, as soon as you get out of their house, it's done. All that is done. Like, you get to, you can even do it now. You don't need to tell your parents that you're trying out for your school's debate team. You just do it and then tell them I have practice and go do it.

a lot of us ask for permission. We ask for permission from our parents, from our friends, from our significant others. You don't need permission to just try things and to be a new person and to challenge yourself. You don't need. Nobody is going to sit there and tell you, yes, you can. No, just do it. Look at your parents' lives. Look at them.

Do you like how they live? do you like how they are with each other right do you like the life they've provided you do you like their interest in your life in their own life in their own hobbies in their job profession whatever and if the answer to all of that is no why would you take advice from them why would you take any advice from them Now, some advice might be very good. And there are certain things that your parents know way more about life than you do. But if they're always going to hold things against you and make you think that you are just less than and that you will always be a failure no matter what you do and you are internalizing that, what good is this dynamic of them being like a career advisor doing for you. She knows.

How? Did you black? No. The Devil Wares Prada 2. He's the movie event 20 years in the making. Honestly, can't with the secrets anymore, so I think we just should tell her. Will you two please spit it out already? This Friday, be the first to experience it only in theaters.

In light of the recent scandal, I'm here to restore your credibility. Oh, because we're a team now? That's a nice story. The Devil Where's Prada 2 in Theaters Friday. It's not. It's ruining your life. and your parents are supposed to be there to support you and to love you and everyone's dynamic is different. If you know deep down that you have convinced yourself that you are a failure and that you will always be a failure,

I just want you to know that that is your decision. There is nobody in this world that is putting that label onto you, even if you think society has deemed it for you that, oh, you're just cooked, man. Oh, you're 24. You still live with your parents and you can't pay rent. Man, you tell you're a loser. it's all a bunch of baloney. It's all a bunch of nonsense.

It's all a bunch of comparison to try to make you feel bad so you can buy something to forget about your life and the feelings that you have so that you can distract yourself from how you feel. That's what it is. So rebel against that. Screw being defined by your parents. If you're a failure, so be it. So be it. your parents are not you know running your life for you they gave birth to you w they created they did a little collab and they created you but it's your journey now and you can

accept it and you can be like all right let me pick up the Lego pieces let me try to build something maybe I'll you know I want to build a castle I might build a building but who cares I'm still going to build regardless or you can just look at the pieces all just broken and, you know, disheveled and be like, wow, I can't believe like I would have to put this together. I'm just never going to do this. I'm not good enough. You decide. Zirky Show.

Today's episode of the Zirky Show was filmed in beautiful sunny, Cripple Creek, Colorado. I was hoping there was going to be some snow, but it's kind of melting, bro. It's really nice outside. If you're ever in the United States of America, come to Colorado. It is such a beautiful state. Did you know that the Zerkees show is everywhere you go? That is correct. You can watch it, you can scroll, you can stream it.

Choice is yours. If you want to tap in, it is the Zerky Show all over the globe everywhere you go. That is the best way to tap in. Do the things that bring you joy. If you're feeling festive this holiday season, make some gingerbread cookies or some snickerdoodle cookies. Just have a warm glass of milk or a milk-adjacent beverage if you're lactose intolerant and enjoy yourself. Sit on the couch, watch some movies,

call a homie that you haven't talked to in a while, wish him happy holidays, and Zerke Show as always, if you're trying something new, just know that I believe in you, and I am sending all of you lots of love and peace.