People will tell you whatever they like or has worked for them: have kids, get married, upskill in a certain field or w/e, but there's a small likelihood that this will also work for you.
Take charge of your life and stop delegating your choices to other people. You don't need to solve the world's problems, but your own.
So many people have kids being mentally not prepared because they have their own sort of issues. They end up adding yet another human being with many issues to this world, which has enough plenty.
Don't go work in a field because their family or friends told them to do it. But they end up hating it, or just not really being excited enough about it to succeed at it.
And so on. There'll be plenty of people wanting to give advice either for egotistical reasons or to make their own audience (like on social media platforms). But they won't be accountable for your life on your outcomes, you are the only person accountable for yourself.
You can read a few books and decide for yourself whether the contents make sense, and if there's anything you would take the risk to follow through. But don't make the mistake of thinking that because of somebody wrote a book about a subject, or because an anonymous post on the internet has a lot of upvotes, that this should also matter to you. You make your own choices, always.
The only real tip that should function well for all human beings is taking care of yourself and visiting the doctor regularly: exercise/sports(whatever works for you) and also find some activities to keep your mind happy and working.
The more we learn about heritability and environment the stronger genetic determinism (at scale) gets.
If you are smart and relatively well off (as is your partner) have as many kids as you can.
The challenges we face in the coming century require as many of the best and brightest of us as possible.
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
It's probably not going to work by first finding out a potentially useful person. What I mean is: when you meet people who share a common interest, don't let the relationship die when one moves away, just try to keep in touch.
Anyway, I'm an antisocial introvert so maybe I'm not a good person to teach anyone how to network... (shrug)
