Hi everyone! This is my first post, so bear with my long storytelling.
My brother (23 M), "Peter", recently graduated from university. As a current uni student, I acknowledge that it is a big accomplishment. My parents want to buy him a brand-new PC as a grad gift.
I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve a gift. What’s upsetting to me is this specific gift due to a long pattern of behaviour that my parents have enabled (most likely due to exhaustion from parenting him).
**Background:** I love my brother, but he is a fucking prick. He has anger problems, which are now more controlled. For example: There are fist marks in our walls from when I told him he couldn’t play on my Game Boy (he was 17 at the time; I was 14). He also loved tormenting me and my mom, calling us names, yanking my hair, spitting at my mom, and slamming our doors constantly. He was too scared to do anything to my dad (my dad was intimidating, but he has never ever hurt us physically or emotionally). These behaviours meant that he took all of my parents’ attention growing up, leaving me to take care of my emotional needs myself.
I feel like I’ve always had to work much harder than he has to get what I want. He tends to "fall upwards".
For example, he would manipulate his teachers to boost his grade by telling them a false sob story about "problems at home" or "my family member/pet died", all of which are BS. He was like this till he graduated, never studying for a damn minute, but managed to get into a prestigious university using his manipulation tactics.
In university, his laziness caught up to him. He almost failed his first semester. Most days, all he did was play video games on his PC. He was a business major, and from what I understand, networking and internships matter a lot. Over five years, he made no effort to build connections or get and intership.
During the summers, he’d game all day and worked twice a week at a restaurant. He is now jobless and broke.
My parents started charging him rent, which has somehow still not motivated him to get a job, and he is running out of money. To me, rewarding him with a new PC is like rewarding the very habits that keep him stuck.
I got into an argument with my parents about enabling him, and I called my brother a "lazy, ungrateful piece of shit", which I know may make me TA, but I’m frustrated and honestly hurt. I feel like I’ve been ignored for years because so much energy went into dealing with him, and it feels like he’s being rewarded despite how he’s treated everyone.
**AITA for blowing up at my parents/brother and being angry about the PC gift?**