Here's how I fucked up: I dicked around throughout college and years after (and high school, really), paying little attention to career, finance, direction, and organization in general. I got more serious just as my two daughters were born, which means that the years of their young childhoods have seen me distracted by goals and demands that I should have addressed years ago.

If you like your children (not everyone does), their youngest years can be absolutely fucking magical. Nothing else in my life compares, and here's the real bummer: it's short. I love the people my kids become as they grow through the stages of their young lives, but they turn into different people, and jesus christ I miss my babies.

So yes, absolutely, get your shit together while you're a young woman or a young man. Make it your goal to be able to relax in the presence of your children. You only get one shot.

I don't think you're intending to flaunt the fact that these are realistic goals for you but not for others. But it is very easy to read this as such. Some of that turns on what you mean by "financial independence" — if you mean something other than a full-time or multiple part-time jobs, it entails a whole other set of preferences and priorities which are relatively narrow.

A key piece here is that there is a hard deadline, at least for women, and if you have a partner & intend to someday have kids, that needs to be on your radar. A bunch of probabilities re: outcomes of pregnancy start to change as a woman OR man gets older.

There's also relative age of parents to children. Like it or not, your energy level and resilience will change as you progress past your 20s and into your 30s. You could make a decent case that young people are in some dimensions well-suited to raising kids.

And don't forget about your own age relative to your child as an adult— there's a relatively large delta between 60 years old and 70 in terms of mobility, health, etc.

Human beings are also incredibly resilient. It's not something to be proud of, that people who're struggling can somehow make things work, but the reality is that what may seem completely infeasible to you can still work. There's a vast range of outcomes which could arguably constitute "success" or "failure," to the extent those terms have any meaning.

Finally, remember the adage that happiness equals reality divided by expectations. Just as expectations can be too low, they can be too high. You can try to control for every possible outcome, setting up an optimal parenting situation, but it's all a gamble. Shit happens, incl. kids themselves. And while it may look to you like other people made suboptimal choices, maybe try to remember the foregoing.

No, it doesn't make sense. Your comment is naive and/or jerkish. You should feel bad about yourself for posting it.

the part which resonates with me is your first one - financial independence. Starting a business isn't for everyone, and it can be hugely risky, but before money came 2nd or 3rd behind career development and maybe challenges. Now stability of income is probably no.1, and it's changed the way I run my business.

Fuck it, let other people worry about the extinction of humanity -- they can have the kids. The genetic differences between all of us are pretty minor anyway, so one's as good as another.

Who knows who Aristotle's kids were anyway?

Not likely. The irresponsible will always reproduce like rabbits by the drinking age.