Last week I broke up with my girlfriend. Why? Because she decided it's time to quit her job and start youtube full-time.

To get this out of the way - I have no issue with the type of content she makes or the long term prospects of youtube as a career. I don't know how much she makes exactly, but her subscriber count is a bit over 300k and she usually posts 2x a week. However much it is, apparently it's at the point she feels like she can live on just that income.

Regardless, that isn't my problem. I have two main issues. The first is privacy. She doesn't show her face or connect her real name to her work, but I'm just not comfortable having overlap with someone who places themselves in the "public sphere" so to speak. It may be paranoid, but I just don't like the risk factor.

The bigger problem is harder to explain. I just don't like the idea of being with an "entertainer". It's not that I don't respect it - you're making money doing what you love, being your own boss. That's pretty cool. But it's not what I look for in a partner. I want to be with someone who does something of real value for the world.

She worked at a daycare before, and I respected that a lot. There's very little of greater importance than caring for and educating the youth. Being an entertainer on the other hand...it entertains people, but it doesn't do much good for the world. A musician or a writer or an artist are hard "maybes", because I do think the arts are important, but there's a big difference between making some modern art that only serves the purpose of helping rich people launder money, and putting a piece of your soul to the canvas.

To me, the whole thing just speaks to a fundamental misalignment of our values. I think about the future, and I wonder how I'm supposed to tell my children how important it is to develop real skills and do tangibly good things for the world, then they point to what mom does for work and ask why they can't just do that.

I explained all of this to her. It wasn't an easy conversation to have. She asked why I didn't raise the issue earlier. Honestly, I had considered it, but decided against it because it felt a bit like making a mountain out of a molehill, especially considering I didn't know for sure she was going to pursue this long term. I also didn't want to turn it into some kind of "quit youtube or I'm dumping you" ultimatum. Given how this has turned out, clearly I handled things wrong. Hindsight is a bitch.

Anyway, she told me I'm an asshole for leading her on and that I wasted her time. She also said it was immature to end things without offering a chance for compromise. I feel like that isn't fair, but I've often been told in my life I have a very different/weird way of thinking. So, what do y'all think? Am I an asshole?