Delayed Childbearing: I Too Succumb

The next year I’ll mark something of a milestone in my life, and a rather grim one at that: I’ll be as old as my parents were when I was born, as old as my father was in September 2023 and as old as my mother was in January 2024. It’s extremely unlikely I’ll have a child by then, so I too shall soon succumb to the modern malaise of delayed childbearing.

Not that I’d have it any other way, to be frank; I wouldn’t want to take a lover who was local to my home region in any way, shape, or form, or raise my kids there. But I still find it depressing. Ideally I’d have gotten a much bigger financial windfall much earlier in life and had my kids in my teens, but that just wasn’t realistic. Or was it?

A counterfactual Me

As Thor says on Nostr:

i don’t actually have all that much respect for early holders of Bitcoin because i heard about Bitcoin on Slashdot when it first came out and could have gotten some Bitcoin at that point. thing is that no one saw it as anything but a nerd’s toy at the time. i think the people who got into it at the time were just playful. at the time, being interested in Bitcoin was like being interested in Monopoly money or some other game like Rubik’s cubes. “fun plaything.” and if you just so happened to like computer toys, you might make a Bitcoin wallet as a kind of game. and this toy that you dicked around with a decade ago suddenly became very valuable. i wasn’t the type to dick around with toys so i didn’t get a wallet at the time. i’m not sure how this makes you particularly respectable.

That got me thinking, hence my reply:

I know! I was actually one of the earlier people who even heard of Bitcoin. I probably could have very easily bought $100 worth to fool around with just to have it back in 2010 and with the type I am I’d have probably held onto it through the all-time high. $0.40 per Bitcoin then means I’d have bought 250 bitcoin, which means I’d have $5.6 million in Bitcoin right now. $15 million or so at the all-time high a while back.

OTOH with the big runup in 2017 I’d have probably have started reallocating a lot of my crypto winnings to TQQQ right then (that’s around the time I started doing that with the nest egg I have in real life!). Ironically that’d have probably netted me more wealth than holding Bitcoin after 2017! 3:1 leveraged tech stocks have done better than cryptocurrencies over that period.

Hmm…checking it with Portfolio Visualizer, I’d have somewhere in the neighborhood of $19 million now, $72 million at the peak last year. That’s around the amount of wealth I want for my preferred lifestyle that I’m working toward building now; I would be *so* much further ahead in life…

Makes me think, to be honest. I ended my teens in 2014, and counterfactual me would only have had $80,000, hardly a big enough nest egg to start a family on, but 2017 would have been my big year; at that epochal Bitcoin peak I’d have had $5 million, which is more than enough for me to move out of my rather podunk hellhole of an area and lead a nice lifestyle in the most sophisticated parts of the world, places I’d actually like to live in, where I’d be far more likely to find a beloved and then have children with them. I was 23 then; who knows if I’d have found anybody by now anyway, but I’m sure I’d have had a much better time of it in any case!

I think there’s an excellent chance, however, that I would have found somebody and had kids earlier in my life than my parents did, while living a far more luxe lifestyle. Consider that as it is I have my best friend, who’s prototypical of the sort of person I’d want to marry and have children with…were it not for being slightly older than me — old enough to have literally been born in the Soviet Union (to think that’s only slightly older than me…talk about feeling old!) — and, much more importantly, already being taken. She’s the only woman I’ve ever met who always makes me feel I’d actually like to be married to her, along with everything else loving and romantic and family-like; her very presence shows me that the ideal of passionate soul-mate love I crave is possible for me, as if she were my guardian angel reminding me to accept nothing less in my life. Most importantly, although she’s a rare bird, if I managed to meet one such woman in a relatively unfavorable area, my odds in a favorable area given some years of searching might not be insurmountable.

Maybe I’ll need a Backup Plan…

Still, even in the swankiest environments studded with smart hot people, I know that statistically those who make the cut to even turn me on, let alone set my soul on fire, are relatively thin on the ground. I might not find anybody. This is especially troubling. Oh, as things stand now I’m on track to make money and grow it so I can leave my home environment to somewhere much better, but that process will take years, putting the upgrade in my station off until potentially well into my forties. Fortunately for me I’m exactly the type to have an easy time then — I’ve always been good-looking, at 29 I’m routinely mistaken for a college student or someone not yet old enough to buy alcohol, and mentally I just don’t seem to have life stages like other people do (I was an adult-like child and now I’m a child-like adult) — but realistically it’ll still be a handicap in dating young women, certainly compared to the time of it twentysomething counterfactual me would have had, making my odds even more difficult.

Single parenthood is an option I’ve considered, since I have no beloved in sight, and is my contingency plan in case I’m here in my forties in the same situation I’m in today; it’ll take a lot of money, which I don’t have at the moment, but in my forties I’m sure that’ll be taken care of. Frankly, if I were a girl in my situation I’d throw caution to the wind and become a choice mom right now; I’d like to have a big family, a whole house full of children, and to fulfill a goal like that 29 is as long as I’d feel comfortable waiting to get started as a woman.

And even more frankly, it’s the way my own mother should have had me; my own parents’ marriage wasn’t what I (or them) would call a success, and literally nobody in my immediate family was truly satisfied with their choice of spouse, so with that in mind taking longer than my own parents to form a family isn’t exactly tragic.

Conclusion

Still, staring down the realistic possibilities left open to me in my thirties and beyond, they range from the daunting to the downright depressing, maybe because deep down I always really wanted to have that storybook life, to be a glamorous jet-setter with a gorgeous soul-mate wife in a passionate marriage and a whole bunch of children we had together, but I never had the opportunities early in life to come remotely close to making it happen while I was still young enough to truly enjoy it, still young enough to have not missed the boat in some fashion. I can’t help but feel I never had what it took to make my own opportunities, but when I look back, though I feel in my heart I must have done better, I realize in my head I couldn’t have realistically done better than I actually did, which makes my dream life feel so, so out of reach.

Yet it’s a dream that I simply must fulfill to nourish my soul, or else I’ll be empty inside for the rest of my life. I can’t help but feel if it’s that important to me, if it’s that vital to my life, then if I put in the work to meet my dream future it will all be there for me, daunting or no daunting, statistics or no statistics, realistic or unrealistic, perhaps in the most unexpected of ways. I must believe…