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Ask HN: What do you wish you had done/known in your 30s?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you wish you had done/known in your 30s?

#181

Post by agent008t »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #71
scionthefly wrote: post #17

In your 30s, if you are waiting to have kids for various reasons, you really need to stop delaying. Your probability of successfully having kids goes down every year, and by your early 40s your options for medical help if you have infertility stop being available because even those interventions lose effectiveness. If you want kids, just have the kids. You're not going to care that you were being responsible and wait…

Additionally, If you're waiting for the "right time" it'll never happen.

That is not a good reason to have children when it is not the right time. You are gambling with someone else's life. Absolutely do wait until it is the right time, and if it never comes - do not have children.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish you had done/known in your 30s?

#182

Post by drnonsense42 »

agent008t wrote: post #180
scionthefly wrote: post #17

In your 30s, if you are waiting to have kids for various reasons, you really need to stop delaying. Your probability of successfully having kids goes down every year, and by your early 40s your options for medical help if you have infertility stop being available because even those interventions lose effectiveness. If you want kids, just have the kids. You're not going to care that you were being responsible and wait…

"If you want kids, just have the kids" sounds very irresponsible - a good way to create a lot of suffering. It is not a decision you can reverse. You should give it a lot more thought than to choosing your career, where/how you live, or to getting a pet. It is shocking that so often it is the opposite, and people 'yolo' into this decision. If anything, you should err on the side of not having children, unless you are…

This is the type of modern wisdom that the person you’re responding to is deliberately contradicting. This modern wisdom is why our birth rate (at least for citizens) is so catastrophically low. Sure, you can’t be a 20yo janitor with a housewife, 3 kids, a home, and new iPhones every 2 years, but plenty of people go for kids before they’re “ready” and make it just fine.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish you had done/known in your 30s?

#183

Post by spacebanana7 »

411111111111111 wrote: post #152
Xeoncross wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that we have too many mouths to feed, it's that we have too many selfish people in positions of leadership and authority who exploit the masses to line their own pockets. Having 50% less people would reduce the overall hunger numbers, but not the ratio.

> Having 50% less people would reduce the overall hunger numbers, but not the ratio. This argument is flawed because of the we're consuming significantly more resources then our planet could provide sustainably. Increasing the quantity of consumers will always be detrimental for as long as resources are finite.

With respect to food poverty, the increase in logistics/technology/marketing productivity may well offset some (perhaps all) of the resource pressure that a growing population creates.

Generally speaking, logistics have huge economies of scale (see Amazon) so an increase in market size will reduce the logistics cost per each item of food. Especially, for cold perishable dairy foodstuffs like dairy the cold chain costs may well dominate the costs of cows.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish you had done/known in your 30s?

#184

Post by lawlorino »

wodenokoto wrote: post #179
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #13

I wish I had realized that I was still young. I had some early startup-ish projects in the late-nineties/early-2k's, they crashed and burned with the dotcom crash, and I felt like I had lost any chance at making something cool or any kind of impact. I even felt like, at the age of 28, I was too old for dating and had missed all my opportunities. Things picked up for me in every respect — professional and personal — a…

30 is the new 20. I had a talk with a friend the other day about how 50 year olds used to be old. They just don’t look or feel that way now a days

I sometimes think this, but then I wonder if it's just because I too got older.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish you had done/known in your 30s?

#185

Post by edanm »

unmole wrote: post #177
walkhour wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the type of thing only a doctor can say. This information is the first result when you Google "fertility by age" [0]. This should be mentioned more often, not to be sexist, but so everyone has the complete information, it's way more cruel to allow people to be deluded until their forties just for them to realize one day they can't have children. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_and_female_fertility

From the Wikipedia article itself: > While many sources suggest a more dramatic drop at around 35, this is unclear since few studies have been conducted since the nineteenth century. One 2004 study of European women found fertility of the 27–34 and the 35–39 groups had only a four-percent difference.

I don't think it's just fertility that people are talking about. In most cases that I hear this talked about, it's generally around the fact that pregnancies are riskier after 35.

From the article:

> Women who become pregnant after age 35 are at increased risk for complications that affect the parent and fetus.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish you had done/known in your 30s?

#186

Post by micromacrofoot »

agent008t wrote: post #181
micromacrofoot wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, If you're waiting for the "right time" it'll never happen.

That is not a good reason to have children when it is not the right time. You are gambling with someone else's life. Absolutely do wait until it is the right time, and if it never comes - do not have children.

I don't think you're quite following where I'm coming from and maybe because I didn't provide much detail. "The right time" is usually a moving target, right job, right house, right income, right mindset, right location... you can "just another year" things for a decade... if you wait too long that window won't come and you'll be too old. Having children gets much much harder if you wait until the last minute (in terms of biology).

I spent a lot of time wanting things to be perfect, but realized that there's never a perfect time. Other parents and prospective parents I know have said similar things.

Having kids is always a gamble, whether you've got a perfect life or not. You do have to decide if you're ready to shoulder the challenge, and don't force it if you're not, but if you're waiting for external factors to be just right you're probably wasting your time.

"Do not have children" probably isn't going to resonate with anyone. If someone wants that experience for their life it's going to be hard to dissuade, and who are you to make that decision? Should only the rich have children? only the fit? only the wise?

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish you had done/known in your 30s?

#187

Post by drnonsense42 »

fatjokes wrote: post #75
Xeoncross wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I had no idea "advanced maternal age" was only 35

It's the type of thing only a doctor can say. I mentioned it off-hand to an ex-girlfriend and was called a sexist (not in an angry/confrontational way, but pretty much dismissed equally off-hand).

Someone who refutes conventional medical knowledge, which was presumably crafted in part by women and is likely regularly scrutinized by a large body of female medical researchers, as sexist without any counter argument, does not sound like someone to take seriously, let alone are they a good partner choice.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish you had done/known in your 30s?

#188

Post by v-erne »

ryandvm wrote: post #96
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see the benefits of having a spiritual community around you, but, like, how do you convince yourself that supernatural things like gods exist? There's just very little tangible or logical there. Or would it be worth it to participate without really believing? Or you just somehow start believing? Frankly, for me doing that would probably be comparable to asking you to convert to Hinduism or something similar.…

I'm not sure I believe that any particular religion is correct, but it doesn't take very much faith to believe that there is a God. Look at it this way: scientifically, the best explanation we have is that there was nothing and then from an infinitesimal point all of the entire universe sprang. For no discernable reason. That's pretty freaking wild. The idea that there's a God out there past all that doesn't seem tha…

I always wonder - where do people get this intuition that something out of nothing is somehow more crazy idea than some supreme ephemeral being that existed before all this. The infinite regression argument is quite convincing that its rather the other way around - God is too complex idea to be the simplest possible answer.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish you had done/known in your 30s?

#189

Post by agent008t »

drnonsense42 wrote: post #182
agent008t wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you want kids, just have the kids" sounds very irresponsible - a good way to create a lot of suffering. It is not a decision you can reverse. You should give it a lot more thought than to choosing your career, where/how you live, or to getting a pet. It is shocking that so often it is the opposite, and people 'yolo' into this decision. If anything, you should err on the side of not having children, unless you are…

This is the type of modern wisdom that the person you’re responding to is deliberately contradicting. This modern wisdom is why our birth rate (at least for citizens) is so catastrophically low. Sure, you can’t be a 20yo janitor with a housewife, 3 kids, a home, and new iPhones every 2 years, but plenty of people go for kids before they’re “ready” and make it just fine.

Why is it 'catastrophically' low? It is not obvious to me that the UK, for example, would not enjoy much higher standards of living if it had half the population. Technology and innovation does not increase the availability of good land and nice housing, but it does massively increase productivity in other areas.

I would also argue that plenty of people that go for children who are not ready for it don't make it just fine. More importantly, their children, that didn't ask for any of it, end up suffering because of their mistakes. Plenty of people have psychological issues of various degrees because of poor parenting. 15% of families in the UK are lone parent families! By age 12 a staggering 40% (!) of children are not living with both birth parents! [1] And these figures are almost twice as bad for low-income families. And out of the children that do live with both birth parents, 11-28% of the parents report an unhappy relationship. That is the catastrophe.

Humans have this strange blindspot where they tend to be irrational and irresponsible about the decision to procreate. Previous generations did not have much of a choice because of lack of available contraception, lack of knowledge. Our generation has no excuse.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish you had done/known in your 30s?

#190

Post by heurisko »

leonroy wrote: post #122
deathanatos wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you are in a position where you could potentially start a family I'm in my 30s, and this seems to be the trickiest part that people older than me — sorry — seem to want to just pave over. House prices are bananas. Trump, COVID, Russia have erased years of investment gains. Student loans are a constant tax on my finances (that I'm almost free of… …soon…). Wage growth has been stagnant (my career has seen ~4.7% Yo…

I feel this living in London and seeing my parents having achieved a measure of success at a younger age far greater than my own. But not every country has seen this level of affluence for the generation before ours and indeed not every race. Minorities in the US in particular might argue otherwise about whether the previous few decades were better than the current ones. Whenever I feel tempted to look at the past wi…

> I recall a commentator speaking about how they'd read the newspaper each morning with a knot in their stomach, wondering if a nuclear mishap had occurred somewhere in the world.

Given the Russia, Ukraine, Chernobyl situation, I think my generation also has claim to worry about nuclear mishaps caused by geopolitical wars.

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