My sibling is a 25-year-old former NEET who keeps wasting my parents’ money by repeatedly enrolling in community college courses and dropping out after the first one or two weeks. The courses themselves are uninspiring, things like medical lab technology, compared to other trades the school offers. At one point, my parents paid several hundred dollars for an English composition course that can be tested out of for about $70 and had roughly an 80 percent pass rate the last time I checked. I told both him and my parents this multiple times, and they did not care. They were fine paying $500 anyway. He is perfectly capable of writing and is actually good at it.
For years while unemployed, he has also insisted that he is going to start a business, ranging from an MMA club to an expensive manufacturing business. At one point, my mother suggested buying him vending machines, and he said he would not help because he did not feel like restocking them or collecting the money.
Over the past year, my mother arranged for him to be hired at her workplace to work on a piece of equipment that is clearly on its way out. My family insists this is a high-paying trade, yet whenever I look for jobs involving that equipment, the pay is typically under $20 an hour and there are very few listings. I have shown them this repeatedly and still cannot get a clear explanation for why they believe it is such a lucrative and in-demand skill. As far as I can tell, it is only in demand at my mother’s workplace because they never upgraded and are still using obsolete machinery. Everywhere else has already moved on. I have tried to understand this in good faith, assuming there might be something I was missing, but the only explanation I ever get is, “We pay someone $70k to do it,” referring to a worker who has been there for over a decade and is skilled at everything in the warehouse.
Over the years I have tried many times to reason with him and my family about all of this, but they seem committed to being wrong. To make it worse, my parents treated me very differently growing up. Recently, I’ve gone fully no-contact with them because of their abuse. They verbally abused me every single day, seriously neglected (criminal-level including pulling me out of school and not teaching me anything), a few times even physically battering for not being perfect, while they coddled him. They even said this girl who works 3 jobs (accounting assistant, sports coach, and owns a
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