My dad is not the kind of person who shows his emotions. He’s the stereotypical Asian male, the one who is usually stoic, sticks with the facts and the tasks at hand and never tries to enter the realm of feelings and inner thoughts.

I sent him this article from the New York Times about a successful woman who experienced her own stroke quite young, the same article I wrote about last week. I said to him over email, hey, sometimes, even when you think you are healthy and are doing the right thing, things happen, and you need to treat them with urgency.

He replied back with something along the lines of, “Luke Perry’s situation was probably more complicated than that. He was likely on drugs!”

I responded, eh. Should we really be that quick to assume drugs were responsible for this? I’m not fully sure?

My dad’s last response to me on this via email: Even if you think you are healthy because you’re eating relatively healthily and exercising regularly, if you work in an office full of politics and have a stressful work life, then you aren’t healthy!

I stared at that short and sweet email for a while. He’s basically saying to me… that that is my life. That’s probably Chris’s life.

Then, I thought about all those times my dad has always said that working for someone else is always going to be terrible because you are at the beck and call of someone else. You are constantly serving someone else and not yourself, that the best way to live is to work for oneself because you can run your life the way you want it and don’t have to answer to anyone.

Before I left to go back to New York on this last trip home, he said, “Remember to take care of yourself,” with a stern voice. My dad worries about me. I know he does because my mom always tells me that he wonders if I am getting enough sleep or am stressed out from work… because they know I would never tell them if it was bad.

My dad is right, though. Working for someone else really does suck… especially when you have officially gotten recognized for being a top performer and are not rewarded proportionally for it.