191–200 of 287 posts
50. I wish I had not been so fat. I lost 80 pounds over the last 2 years walking 2.5 miles a day and eating more healthily. I wish I would have saved more or taken pensions more seriously. I wish I had made my kids do more chores around the house to better prepare them for adulthood.
How exactly cleaning and throwing out the garbage prepares You for adulthood ?
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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 ter…
There are other ways to experience the joys of parenthood, especially given that most parents seem to look for any way they can find to offload such joys for some reason. Offer to look after your nieces and nephews for a time, for example. Run a volunteer daycare.
If you are not willing or able to be a good driver, you should not drive. If you are not willing or able to be a good parent, do not have children. Do think about the decision very, very carefully - the stakes are very high. If you don't end up having children - well, at least you didn't end up causing others any harm.
But I understand what you are saying - you should also recognize the situation where you are, in fact, ready. It's like being able to choose when to sit an exam - there is always another week you can spend studying, and at some point you have to decide you are ready once you are in fact reasonably prepared.
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"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.
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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.
I think your advice is correct for those that want kids. The issue becomes contentious when this is advocated to people who mostly are on the other side of that decision. Going for kids before you are ready is still aligned with ‘wanting kids’.
Debt sucks and should be avoided!
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'm in my early 40s, I can't really think of anything, maybe because it's too close to realize what mistakes I might have made, and I don't really believe in that kind of retrospection generally. FWIW, if you are in a position where you could potentially start a family (and want to some day), consider doing it in your early 30s (or earlier), there are a lot of things that get tougher as you get older. I don't regret…
> 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 really, really, really hate to defend Mr. Trump, but on his first day of office the Vanguard total stock market index closed at $116.91; on his last day of office it closed at $198.86, a 70.01% increase (14.19% annualised). There are numerous reasons to criticise the former president, but the performance of the stock market during his tenure does not appear to be one of them.
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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…
Secondly, I don’t think your data on single parent families really disproves anything, specifically because that data is highly confounded by drug addicts, high school dropouts, unwed couples, accidental pregnancies, and dozens of other factors. If we’re to reason in good faith, the advice I and others are advocating for is that you don’t need to be a homeowner with a 200k+ salary, although of course you should be a reasonably mature, employed adult with a mature partner.
I think it’s in poor faith as well to reduce this to “if you feel a need to have children, you’re irrational and still stuck in go-forth-and-multiply mode”. But, again, this is not an issue anyone can find common ground over with reason or data (which you can find to support any conclusion), and I expect the HN crowd falls on a particular side of this on average, so I won’t argue further.
- Register to donate bone marrow. I didn't donate blood for ages and didn't register for marrow until my 30s. I matched a leukemia patient, did a harvest and we had a successful transplant. The modern procedure is non-surgical and stem cell based. There was no pain. I later found out that there had been another search in the registry I would have matched for, but I was not registered yet. (That patient did undergo chemo and survived, but the transplant would have been better.)
- Get comfortable talking to people about your feelings. Hire someone to talk to if you don't have someone. As an engineer, if I have a problem with someone I try to logic them through it... but feelings don't work that way. "I don't like X" or "that makes me feel Y" are inputs to logical systems even if they are not logical themselves. Many jobs, relationships, etc. would have gone differently. "I am afraid of Z" has helped me in a lot of cases. People just assume I'm tough guy.
If you don't go back to school, be sure you save a decent percentage of your income and invest it wisely.
If you don't like living where you're at, move.
All of this is predicated on your being single, or at least not having kids. If you have kids, raise them to the best of your ability-- your life is not entirely all about you at this point.