“I want to study psychology and literature. Why don’t you understand? It’s my life, my career. Stop forcing me!” I scream at my mother.

She never understands me. Or worse,she never even tries to. How can money be everything? Money is nothing compared to passion. How could she force engineering down my throat when I am almost 16, practically an adult? I should be able to choose my own future.

She listens. And then, very calmly, she replies,
“We are middle-class people. We can’t afford for you to study something that may not earn you money later. If you do engineering, you can take care of the family once you graduate. After you settle down, you can pursue what you like. Even if you fail, you’ll still have a degree that will help you pay the bills.”

I heard her words, but I did not feel understood. I felt trapped. It was not like I had a choice anyway. I could not rebel my way out of this. So I gave in, carrying resentment with me.

Seven years later, my life looks very different.

I work in an air-conditioned office. Breakfast, lunch, snacks, tea, coffee, everything I need is available without a second thought. A really good salary gets credited to my account every month. And honestly, why should I complain?

I listened to my mother. And yes, she was right.

I still love literature. I still write. I run my own blog. I am working on my own novel. After work, I write. I work out. Work is not my entire life, but it funds the life I want.

To everyone who confidently says, “Money is not everything,” I am pretty sure you have a good bank balance. And before you say, “No, I just have a decent one,” maga, listen. If you can put a roof over your head and afford three meals a day, you are already richer than 90% of the population.

Money is the only problem until you have enough of it.

When you come from a middle-class family, a corporate job is often the safest way to feed your family and still afford dreams. So I genuinely do not understand why we have built this loud narrative that corporate life sucks. Why quitting a 9 to 5 has been romanticised so aggressively, especially on social media.

I cannot afford that fantasy. If I blindly chase my passion today, who feeds my family? And no, I am not saying following your passion is bad. I am saying not everyone can afford to do it full-time.

Passion of course comes after your stomach is fed,right? Even Virginia Woolf said, “One cannot think well, sleep well, love well, if one hasn’t dined well.”

I work a corporate job and still pursue writing and fitness. I am building my passion on the side. And when it can sustain me and my family, that is when I will quit. Not before.

What bothers me most is this constant hatred for corporate life. The obsession with Fridays. The dread of Mondays. The weekly ritual of complaining.

If you have a corporate job, where you genuinely enjoy the work, you are lucky. You will not dread it every day. Yes, there will be bad days. Yes, there will be terrible managers. But people adapt. Or they switch teams. Or they switch companies.

And if you are like me, doing a job you do not love purely for money, then yes, some days will feel heavy. But you still have evenings. You still have weekends.

You still have time to work on what you love. Complaining every week while doing nothing to change your situation and still living lavishly just feels like loser behaviour to me.

There are plumbers, garbage collectors, municipal cleaners, and so many others working under the sun every single day. No AC. No weekends. Sometimes not even a roof. If you had the privilege to study and land a corporate job, maybe pause and feel grateful.

And if you think startups are all passion and freedom, they are not. Even founders do things they hate. Say you are a founder who doesn’t like marketing,you learn and do it, as you still have to sell. Life does not remove discomfort just because you chose passion.

Life does not always give you what you want. And if you have to do it anyway, why dread it?Suck the fuck up.

Do it happy.Do it peacefully. Do it responsibly. Do it knowing that it is allowing you to survive and slowly build what you love.

Corporate life does not really suck. We have just made hating it fashionable.