Should I start lying to my parents?
Hi everyone! Sorry for the mistakes, English isn't my first language.
I'd love to explain this situation to other parents so maybe someone can enlighten me of how I talk to mine or if I should just lie to them. Thank you everyone in advance.
I studied a STEM degree and I now realize I’ll never be able to turn into a real career. Fortunately, university is cheap in my country, so my problem has nothing to do with a debt. Just to add information, assume my whole 4 years of College Degree cost about the same money an average person earns in 2 or 3 months.
Once I graduated, I quickly understood that I had no real future in the field. I simply don’t have the intellectual skills it takes, and finding a job in it is impossible for someone like me. Because of that, my plan was to get whatever job I could, repay my parents for all the money and time they invested in me, and then move out to start an independent life on my own.
But my parents didn't like the idea of me leaving STEM behind. I decided to give it one last chance. By then, I had already worked and saved money, so I paid for the Master’s degree and my rent in another city entirely by myself. My parents themselves aceepted it like my way of paying them back for my Degree, and I accepted that responsibility willingly because I understood I owed them something for believing in me for so long.
Now that I’ve finished the Master’s, I still feel exactly the same: I am not made for this field, and trying to force a career out of it is pointless. The difference is that now I’ve already repaid my parents in the only way I could, and all I want is to move on with my life. I don’t care anymore about my major. I just want a job, and the chance to live without depending on anyone else.
Yet they still refuse to accept it. Even after more than six straight years of university, they keep insisting that I continue studying, as if more degrees were somehow going to magically make me capable of succeeding in a field that I’m clearly not suited for. The worst is not even the pressure itself, but the fact that they seem completely unable to accept that I’ve failed at this path, no matter how obvious it has become. It's like they can't just accept that I'm not as able as they expected or wanted me to be.
Since they keep insisting, I’ve started wondering if lying to them would simply make life easier for everyone. Since I already 'paid' them back (or at least we agreed that me paying my Master was a payback to them), and live far away in another city, I’ve thought about pretending that I’m working successfully as a STEM scientist and that everything is going great and yada yada yada, while in reality I am working at a bookshop. At this point, all I want is a normal, independent life, to work, earn my own money, and support myself without anyone telling me no shit.