Working from home is a blessing and a curse. You get to skip the commute and wear sweatpants, sure, but you also have to convince the people you live with that you are actually working. It is a universal struggle. But for one young woman on Reddit, the “work from home” battle has revealed a family dynamic so toxic and entitled that I honestly need to lie down just reading about it.
Our narrator is a 25-year-old woman who is, quite literally, carrying her entire family on her back. She has been working from home for five years at her dream job. She pays all the bills. Consistently. She buys the groceries. She is the financial bedrock of the household.
Now, who is she supporting? She lives with her 59-year-old mother, who has been a housewife her whole life. Okay, fair enough. But she also lives with her sister-in-law and her 44-year-old brother. Neither of whom have jobs. They do “labor work” around the house, but let’s be real here. We have a 25-year-old funding the lives of three fully capable adults.
You would think, given that she is the golden goose keeping the roof over their heads and the lights on, they would treat her workspace with the reverence of a cathedral. You would be wrong. Her mother has a habit of just barging in. She wants to talk, she wants to gossip, she wants to do chores in the middle of the workday. For someone who suspects she has ADHD, these interruptions are productivity killers.
So, the narrator did something incredibly smart and professional. After a noisy family party where she needed to retreat to get work done, she made a sign. A simple “Do Not Disturb” sign for her door. She even added a note to “contact me in messenger” so she wouldn’t miss anything urgent. It was a perfect boundary. She put on her headphones, locked the door, and finally got some peace.
But peace in this house is apparently a crime. The conflict started when the electrical wiring needed fixing. The power had to be cut, so the narrator couldn’t work. She took a nap. When she woke up, she saw a message from her mom asking to be reimbursed for the repair cost.
Let’s just pause. The mom paid the worker, but immediately turned around to collect that cash back from her daughter. The daughter came out and asked if she needed the money right now. The mom’s response? A rude, snippy “if you please.” The attitude is palpable.
But the real explosion happened when the lights came back on. The narrator went back into her room to work and closed the door. And that is when she heard it. Her mother, ranting outside the door about why she needs to lock it and claiming she “doesn’t need privacy.”
Excuse me? She doesn’t need privacy? She is the landlord, the bank, and the employer of this household. She is the only reason you have electricity to power that rant, Mom. The idea that a 25-year-old woman paying every single bill isn’t entitled to a closed door while she earns that money is absolutely wild.
The narrator admits she is hurt. She feels she has been nothing but a “good daughter.” She pays the bills without help. She supports a brother old enough to be her father. And their response to her setting a single, tiny boundary to protect her mental health and her job performance is to gossip about her and get angry.
So, is she the ahole? Absolutely not. N-T-A. The only aholes here are the three adults leeching off a young woman and then complaining about the service. This isn’t about a sign. This is about a family who has forgotten that “no” is a complete sentence and that gratitude should be the default setting, not entitlement.
She doesn’t need to apologize. She needs to move out. Let’s see how much they value “privacy” when they have to figure out how to pay for the roof that provides it.