exasperation

You described a lot of effort on your end to keep that relationship going. That's what I mean. Relationships require maintenance.

Millennials were peak generation for self-taught tech literacy. We were raised in an environment where the technology was simple and open enough to actually be configurable, all while the prize on the other side of figuring out the technology was rewarding.

The older generations didn't have as strong of a reward for figuring out the tech. And the younger generations have too steep a learning curve to get around things, so they never even learned to try, like the "baby elephant syndrome" phenomenon.

And then they can enhance that business by turning around getting pedophiles to subscribe and pay for in game credits so that they can interact with a bunch of undersupervised children.

With fees capped at 14% and interest capped at 35% APR, a doubling could still be legal if they have 2 years to repay, especially with frequent compounding.

Not that children have the patience to wait 2 years for a return on their investment, though.

People think we're eating chicken abortions but really we're eating chicken periods.

He is his own dad, because he did do the nasty in the pasty.

once you've made friends for life, they stick

People drift apart. Actually making the effort to communicate and meet up occasionally is important for maintaining those relationships. If you're not in the place where you're can stay aware of major life changes (marriage, divorce, kids, major career changes, moves between cities, major illness or injury, deaths in family, etc.), were you really "friends for life"?

Even making brunch plans in my 40s requires consulting a calendar. That naturally shrinks the number of close friends in the mix. I'm closer with my friends who live close than the ones who live far, simply out of inertia, that maintaining those relationships takes less effort.

Low maintenance friendships are the best ships 🛳️

I'm no psychoanalyst but it sounds like someone is insecure in their ability to love and be loved and would prefer to guarantee a balanced reciprocity of low effort on both sides.

I've never really liked "children" in the sense of the age group, but I know a bunch of people who have really great, meaningful relationships between adult children and their parents, so I wanted adult children in my late middle ages and retirement ages.

Now, with my own children, I primarily see them as future adults who I get to watch develop into cool people.

People without financial security: "kids are too expensive and I would be exhausted trying to provide for them"

People with financial security: "I'm having a good time, adding a kid to this mix would really require a step back in my lifestyle."

Paul Morphy, chess genius and sometimes described as best in the world in the mid-1800s:

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

Yup. Electrical engineering does something similar. The addition and subtraction of voltages, currents, resistance, capacitance, and inductance in AC circuits is basically unworkable without the shortcut of converting the sinusoidal waves into imaginary phase angles and doing math on them, and then converting them back to sinusoidal waves as necessary.