Real Biological Clock Is You're Going to Die (2018)

I don't know how anyone gets wisdom, without taking very opposite views seriously.

And being grateful for those who took the time to share their epiphanies in such a readable way.

It didn't come across to me as pushy advice, but as advice to think.

Funny, for me the article reads like a ode to saying yes to life, not the other way round..

I'm torn here because you're both right, kinda, from my viewpoint. And that is you should do a thing, whether getting married, having kids, etc. as soon as you're sure you want that.

You shouldn't rush it thinking of years lost, but at the same time, shouldn't delay it until everything's perfect/'the right time', because, from experience, everything will never be perfect.

I’m about to become a parent, about 10 years later than I’d have liked. Main reason for that is just not meeting the right person, pandemic, money etc.

But I only feel ready now. I’m a late developer in general (aren’t all software engineers haha arf) and I honestly felt too free spirited in the past. Many friends had kids a decade or more ago, and they are looking forward to their kids leaving home so they can travel etc. But I’ve already done all that, I have nothing to devote my life to now other than work and family.

In my case at least, being ready was a real thing. It’s really about maturity and having had enough of a life myself.

I was born with a heart defect that will kill me young. I spent my youth waking up from surgeries until I became disappointed I'd woken up. This author is still just a tourist of death going through what I view as an early developmental stage of death realization and their view is effectively just myopic shaming because they had their first realization.

My parents died before I turned 20 and 28.

Death is horrible and loss is horrible but each person gets to pick their meaning generation, that's what makes humans fucking cool.

We are like a random forest of meaning generation, an epicenter of complex meaning creation, the plurality and uniqueness of paths is critical, and each of us gets to decide what our meaning exploration/creation will entail, and no one can rationally shame us for that.

We are all very special. Each and every person. We are the unique meaning generators of the universe, like stars emit photons we emit complex meaning, there is no entity we have observed that has explained to the universe the how and why of bird flight, we generated the how and why of that, we are meaning generating organs of the universe bootstrapped by simpler meaning in rna and dna and each one of us is rare.

Complex meaning generation, storage and emission is still in it's infancy from our empirical observations we can't predict how far into the future meaning generation will reach or what it will accomplish, we can't ex ante predict how important we are, no one can tell us we won't be very important to the casual chain of the universe, it simply cannot be computed ahead of time.

As a child I read the book version of A Baker's Dozen, a true story about an efficiency expert with a heart defect that had 12 children and dies at the end while calling his wife.

Each person generates unique meaning in the universe and the one thing we get to do is decide what our unique meaning exploration path is, no person is guaranteed to see any time with their kids, guaranteed to want to have kids, guaranteed to have a kid they enjoy being around. Decide what you intrinsically find meaningful and generate meaning, the random forrest requires the diversity of search/creation paths.