1) okay, I'm fascinated by the 'fighting in a foreign civil war' thing, can you expound on that?

2) this may sound weird, but I do think that if you want to be a good parent (and please note, I don't actually have kids yet, so ignore this advice if it doesn't ring true) is finding ways to get your 'alone' time despite family responsibilities. I'm also an introvert, but my 'recharge' time is stuff like meditation and solo-programming and math time, so that's pretty easy to do, just set aside a few hours a day to recharge my batteries so I can be fully present for my family the rest of the time, I can see that fighting in a foreign civil war isn't exactly the type of thing you can fit into an hour in the morning before the kids wake up, but if you have similar introverted activities that recharge you that can be more easily done alongside family life, I would argue that you'll be doing your family a disservice not to do them- they deserve you at your best, which means you should give yourself time do fully recharge yourself so you can be there for them the rest of the time.

It's not you, it's just the know-it-all guys with proven recipes for happy life are presumptuous.

lol, what? How can you assume that people in the internet will connect this:

"If you're already happy you should think carefully about having kids though. I was extremely, extremely satisfied with my life before children. My kid is wonderful and healthy but as an introvert I didn't realize just how crushing it is to never get an extended period alone to recharge"

with

"I was doing stuff like fighting in a foreign civil war and commercial fishing in the Bering Sea." ?

Both sentences dont add up, at all.

[flagged]

agreed.

I'm wondering how on earth are people supposed to provide for a family these days?

the techno optimism has been absolutely insane. celebrating that people won't have jobs anymore, that robots will be doing everything and that how the human species is just a stepping stone or something and if you resist you're a "specist" (famously said by Larry Page)

Don't swing to the extremes, world is a bit bigger than news portals and US ones are beyond toxic regardless of the party favored. Nature is still beautiful, traveling is as enlightening as ever, meeting new cultures, foods, learning real history of the world as you visit places is priceless. Raising kids is hard but extremely rewarding. And so on.

Times are not easy, but they are not doomish. Or, every decade there were doomish periods where you could have the same view. every. single. one. How would you feel in late 30s when big part of the world was visibly inching to global war? This is nothing and nobody knows where this current moment will lead us to.