> That entire group of middle-aged people, who made up the adult world when my father was a child, is gone.

That really got me. How can I bring these people, this "adult world" forward in time as a gift to my children?

This essay was in part an inspiration for my (much more upbeat) essay which was on here yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452763, and I linked it at the end, but I thought it deserved a submission on its own.

While I understand and empathize with what this article is getting at ("If you intend to have children, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children."), I strongly disagree. I think people should have kids when they are ready. Make an assessment to the best of their ability when exactly that time has arrived. Then, don't dwell on it further. Especially don't blog about it. There are no counterfactuals, this kind of reflection can only serve to make us miserable.

> But this idea of certainty is a sham, a distraction, something to turn your attention away from the only truly certain thing, which is that your time will run out.

I hard disagree with this entire blog post. What an incredibly depressing, judgmental, and self-centered way to live life. It doesn't matter when you do things as long as you are satisfied with the results.

You should focus more on deeply appreciating all possible results life has to offer than making any particular decision. This is how you find certainty. You must have imagination and see how things would change even if, for better or worse, most of those things never come true. As a matter of fact, none of them will except for the ones you choose. You must always be visualizing what comes next, or else of course you'd be lost and scared. Everything single second of your life is compromises before you even realize you're making them, and there are no right answers. If you can't handle that, you'll never feel happy.

I have super-bad genetics. Not so bad that I have an entirely terrible life, but bad enough that I wouldn't wish them on a child. I know they would hate me, since I am aware of how bad my genetics are.

People who have children think having children is the right choice, generally. They have to, to find meaning in all of the work of having and raising a child. That's understandable. But it is by no means the right choice for everyone.

I had a lousy childhood -- not just because of my genetics. There's no license, no mandatory training for having a child. You can just have one. Many parents are not qualified, by any measure. This keeps therapists well-employed.

Only have a child if you would like to be that child. Only have a child if you feel competent, and able, and certain that when they are an adult they will not resent you -- yes, it's natural to have some resentment for your parents, but this is not the sort of resentment I am talking about.

Do not UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES have a child if you're just looking for 'legacy'. Write a book. Give to charity. But this is a terrible reason to have a child! Don't.

it’s never the right time, not everyone deserves to have kids, and not every kid deserves the parents they got, still, it has to be part of the meaning of life, to see something that is your blood, discover, play, become a responsible adult and one day hopefully decided that it is worth to also have children of their own

happy 2026

> Did we choose the age at which we would have children? What does it mean to choose?

we planned to have a kid by our early thirties. she specifically wanted one by 30. we were both healthy, financially stable with solid careers.

then came multiple miscarriages, 10 years of background/foreground stress, and IVF. now we finally have two healthy ones. i think daily about those 10 years we've lost to spend with our kids while still younger and able to do activities that i still enjoy like snowboarding, mountain biking, etc. thankfully i'll still be able to do some of it, but man, it has been rough. my awesome father-in-law died of cancer 9mo before his grandson's birth; the only thing he ever knew were our ongoing struggles :(

despite all that, when i think of where i was financially then and now (and what i did in those 10 years to get from there to here that would have not happened otherwise), and that if i had a kid 10 years ago it would be a different [probably worse] kid instead of the adorable 2.5yo that runs to me each morning now, i feel a lot better.

my advice would not necessarily be to start earlier, but if you've decided to procreate and consciously deferring it until the "right" time, just expect the really, really unexpected.

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.

(2018)

Some previous discussion:

2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31121453

Very interesting article! Really like when people use fonts with serifs. I noticed the usage of accent aigu instead of apostrophes, was that on purpose? An accent isn‘t an apostrophe, it takes up more space horizontally. Much more obvious in this font.

I feel we should have children as early as possible between 18 and 30, but we should also stay together with our parents. Grandparents can raise their grandchildren. They would do a better job. The problem is now everyone wants to go on their own, separate from the community, then call modern life difficult.