261–270 of 287 posts
One thing I would say is.. Don't drink coca cola.
Sugar coca cola? because I drink a lot of coke zero and pepsi max.
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No please do. You’re on the mark there. I was waiting for someone to make this point. The weirdness comes from the social disparity and disconnectedness from peers their own age due to different social attitudes from parents. The generalisation comes from the observation that older parents tend to lead to less progressive attitudes.
Well, you’re clearly way of the mark here, since you completely missed my point. The weirdness is in your head, mate. (Although the generalization is your responsibility.) I mean, people like you, i.e. people who become parents at a relatively young age, literally have their brain chemistry altered to protect their offspring, WAY before you have actually experienced life as an adult. I could make grand speculative de…
Do you have any links or terms to Google to support this? On one hand it sounds reasonable. But on the other hand for the entirety of human history up until the last several decades what you think of as "relatively young" would have been completely normal or even unusally old. So it wouldn't make sense evolutionarily for that to be disadvantageous.
Disclaimer: had kids young and I think people that want kids and are emotionally mature enough to handle the challenge with a similarly minded partner should not wait and do it young. What is a definition of "ready for kids" that wouldn't cause 99% of people in the world to never have the opportunity to have kids.
Personally: Be happy, proud, and confident no matter your situation. Don't sacrifice family time for your career. Make your bed. Clean your desk. When you feel stuck, overwhelmed or discouraged, you need a "win" and it's best to take an easy win like beating a video game or finish reading a book.
Because you're approaching your 30s, you may find this advice tedious or nonsensical because you're just looking for a stack overflow answer that you can copypasta into your life that fixes everything or makes you rich. There's no magic pill or life hack that fixes your problems. Just be the best version of yourself and good things will come.
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This doesn't match my experience at all. My perspective might obviously be skewed by living in an emerging market economy but I don't know anyone who hasn't seen an improvement in their financial circumstances over seven years, Covid notwithstanding. I really don't think there are a lot of people on HN who are stuck in dead end jobs with no growth. And as harsh as it may sound, if someone can't retire before 80 despi…
Who said anything about people on HN? The friends I'm talking about mostly work retail paying off degrees that were supposed to get them good jobs. The US is not an emerging market economy where there's a lot of potential growth. You either get a job in tech, probably moving away from everything and everyone you've ever known (hard), or you try to create some niche at the intersection of your skills and interests (st…
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…
Make some habits, which include: - Exercise regularly (doesn't mean hours a day in the gym, just make it a regular habit) - Don't eat so much junk, don't drink so much - Have a regular sleep schedule and stick to it. - don't sacrifice for your work, unless your work is also part of your recreation. - conversely do prioritize your relationships - max out your retirement contributions as best you can Age: 50s; some of…
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Oh, it’s been a year and a half and I still feel lost, miserable, betrayed, and so on. My life literally got flipped upside down. I’m definitely not the right person to ask how to get over it. My attempts mostly include focusing on my children and their lives, a lot of going to the gym (daily), kayaking in the summer, snowboarding through the winter, reading, side projects. I’m still in the “never going to be in a re…
Have you thought about talking about this with a therapist?
But yeah.
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…
> I even felt like, at the age of 28, I was too old for dating and had missed all my opportunities. I feel this immensely at 29, turning 30 this year. Especially after moving from another country and having all my friends in long-term relationships. Now just to get out there and have some confidence in approaching people.
Hey, I have a strategy for you that I used for dating. When I was 30, and still single, it was frightening and bewildering since all my friends were married or partnered, but I wasn't. The men my age that I was meeting were still single for a reason. Without internet dating (this was the mid-1990s) I was stuck relying on friends and colleagues, who all said they didn't know anyone suitable who was still single. My chances of meeting someone were dwindling, and I was getting older. When you're female, that's a death sentence for your wish to have kids.
As my life turned out, I'm glad I didn't meet anyone and have kids at that time, because I started a company that went from zero to half-million dollars-a-year in a few years. I poured all that energy that I would have invested in a family into my business. Still, the unknown about whether I would meet someone I could eventually marry did nag at me. I knew I was past the point of having children, but still...
Finally when I was in my late 40s, artificial intelligence had matured enough that I could rely on it to find me a mate. This was in 2011. I registered for OKCupid and, after a few good dates that were a breath of fresh air after not meeting anyone suitable for so long, I met my now-husband with seemingly little effort. As if that wasn't enough of a miracle, my now-husband was a widower, and had a 7 year-old girl he had adopted from Russia. We have raised her together as our daughter. She's now 17, and is the love of my life (besides my husband, of course.)
OKCupid has since been overtaken by Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and match.com. But that's because match.com realized OKCupid's A.I. was a much better system for meeting people, and it was free, too! Match.com bought OKCupid in 2011 with the intention of burying it by doing absolutely no marketing, which is where it stands now.
The great thing about OKCupid was the match score. A caveat here- you have to answer HUNDREDS OF HARD MORAL QUESTIONS for the OKCupid A.I. to work properly. I answered 800 questions over a period of 2 weeks at night, from 10pm to midnight, after I was done running my biggish small business. My husband was, at the same time, slowly answering 1000 questions. Even just the commitment level displayed by taking the time to answer the moral questions, and to take the exercise seriously, is in itself a good indicator of whether the person is earnest or not. It certainly guarantees you're not wasting time with a bot or a scammer. (Romance scams now support the economy of entire developing countries, and have gotten super out-of-hand.)
So, once you've answered hundreds of questions, I found the match scores to be totally trustworthy. The dates I mentioned that I enjoyed were over a 90% match score. (Being a confident and smart heterosexual woman who runs a successful business was lonely in the U.S. at that time. Feminism was still just an ideal, but not a typical lived experience like it is today. Less successful women were more fashionable as mates.)
My husband got an OKCupid match score of 99% with me! And, indeed, he's one of the best-matched people, male or female, that I've ever known. We have now been married for almost 10 happy years. I credit artificial intelligence with my happiness in my marriage and with my lovely daughter, too. Good luck to you. I wish for you the same success I had in my late 40s. Luckily for you, you don't have to wait for A.I. to develop. It's already here!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…
I don't regret putting it off until my 40s because it let me find a person I want to have a family with Thank you for including this tidbit. I'm a man in my early 30s interested in having kids and recently discovered that I've poorly vetted my 5+ year SO's interest in having kids. Her "yeah, I'm hypothetically interested" has become "hard not interested". The requirement to break up with her if I want kids is deeply…