I'm Afraid of Living Well

Note: This post is translated by AI. If you find any unnatural phrasing or errors, please feel free to contact me via email or other channels. Your feedback is appreciated!

This article is the last one of 2025!

If taking the annual review as the last article might have more sense of ritual, but this article is also very commemorative to me. It is a thought that has troubled me for a long time, a bit heavy but very suitable to let go at the end of the year.

Thank you to those who have read my articles in 2025. I will continue to work hard on writing in 2026!

I don't know what everyone's impression of me is? But if I were to evaluate myself, I am a person with insufficient self-confidence, extremely internal friction and half-hearted.

I know I have other strengths, but what bothers me in daily life are these negative labels I attach to myself. Through counseling and writing, I am slowly tearing them off, but there is still a long way to go to get rid of them.

But such me is also "envied" by many people. This is the strongest emotion I have felt in the past half year, and also the one that makes me most overwhelmed.

Simple and Crude Envy

Some people will crudely envy my state of being able to go anywhere abroad. There were also other envied situations before.

Common lines are "So good, I also want to fly around like you", "Really envy you for having no ties in Taiwan". Facing this kind of envy, dissatisfaction will well up in my heart, because if I had ties in Taiwan, or if I could live with peace of mind and happiness in Taiwan, would I need to come out?

The opposite of these words can essentially be the reason why I envy them, "So good, I also want to be able to settle down in Taiwan".

When working holiday in Australia, backpackers envied my language ability; after accidentally letting slip that I was a software engineer, I was envied for high salary and working from home being cool. Although I know backpackers are often once-in-a-lifetime encounters, and lives return to parallel lines after leaving, I still accidentally let those words pierce into my heart.

I realized I hate this feeling of being envied. Part of the reason is that they seem to project their powerlessness onto me, only seeing the result, but ignoring the sacrifices and efforts I paid to achieve this state.

I also know that powerlessness is sometimes not their problem, but I still resent it.

Envy from Mother

At Christmas, I sent a message to my mom saying Merry's Christmas, and sent a photo of me at the snow resort. The reply I got was "You work happier, living a different life, I really want to be like this too".

When I received her reply, the tangled and mixed resentment in my heart instantly unraveled. She and my father are the source of my dissatisfaction with "envy".

Every time I shared some good news with them, I always got an "envy" response.

Common stories in society are that parents raise their children well even if they are poor or in single-parent families, but my story is the opposite. After my parents divorced, they went to pursue their ideal lives respectively. My father wanted to start a business in China, and my mother wanted to find a good man to marry, but neither of their subsequent developments went very smoothly.

I grew up with the help of relatives and noble people around me (high school math teacher, university seniors and some friends who unconditionally supported me).

When I worked hard to get into a good university, she would say "I really hope I could attend university well like you back then"; when I took the money I earned to travel to Japan and bought souvenirs for her, she only said "Really envy you, I can't go to Japan"; when I felt the bottleneck in Taiwan and career and left, she started to fully envy my life.

My current life is the result of being abandoned by her, unexpectedly envied by her in turn.

Maybe I should thank her for not taking me with her back then, otherwise I wouldn't be able to live the life she envisions.

Demand from Father

As for my father, it is less of an emotion of envy, but more like Pavlov's conditioning experiment, making me fear "living well".

Actually I don't interact much with him. Since he is in China, we can only contact by phone or message. At first, I was also willing to talk to him regularly and update him on current situation, even if I felt a bit troublesome.

He went to China for business since I was in junior high school. At first it went smoothly, but when I started working, his business began to decline. Our economic abilities grew in opposite directions.

So when I told him I switched to engineer, he would congratulate me first, and ask if I could lend him money for turnover a few days later; when I finally saved enough money to travel to Japan, he would tell me to have fun first, and ask if I could lend him money a few days later; when I changed jobs and got a raise several times in a row, it was the same routine. The most recent time was before I left Taiwan, he asked if I could take a loan for him.

When I lent him money the first few times, he paid back, but as long as I shared good news with him, I was borrowed money. Slowly it became a kind of conditioning. I am afraid of living well myself, because that might lead to me being demanded, emotionally blackmailed, blamed, or even hinted that my happiness is built on their suffering.

Envy with Good Intentions

Although I really want to delete IG, IG has gradually become a communication software. Due to working holiday, meeting new friends often requires exchanging IG.

Because of the fear of being envied, I have posted less and less updates in recent years, and I also reject the Highlight life on IG very much.

But once I accidentally chatted with a netizen that I don't like being envied. He shared another perspective with me. He told me "You just post more, let us envy!", he thinks people who really care about me would want to see.

I also heard from his tone that his envy is different from my parents' envy. It is a feeling of close friends teasing each other, without throwing out powerlessness, nor demanding.

Conclusion

Finally, to respond to the title, I am afraid of "living well", then what is living well to me?

The current answer would be "Being able to do what I want to do, not hesitating to move forward because of fear".

The intention of writing this article is not to accuse parents. I am very glad that I finally figured out where my being overwhelmed and unknown fear in the heart came from every time I encountered "envy".

Hope I can also slowly believe that I deserve to live well, and can properly face "being envied" in the future.

Thanks to min, YA-Xuan and Hanyuan for reading the draft of the article and giving feedback.