I recently spoke to a client who wanted to discuss the direction his life has been going. One issue we breached was having children. For context, this guy has not even reached his mid-20s but has enjoyed spectacular early success in his career. This year, he expects to pocket $200 to $220k, which probably comfortably puts him in the top 1% for his age group in the United States. I looked up salary statistics for all of the US, and even across all ages, this is a top income, somewhere in the top 5 to 10% (I was a bit surprised that it was not higher; in contrast, in Germany you are in the top 10% already with an income of 70k Euros per year, and in Sweden around 60k Euros is enough for that). My advice was to focus on his career and not to seriously pursue women yet as early career success can pay incredible dividends over the rest of your working life. More importantly, in many high-paying fields you work less as you rise the ladder, while pocketing more money.

When we talked about the issue of having children, I pointed out two important aspects. The first one is the time and energy it takes. For most people in the West, and in particular for the more career-minded who move to big cities for a bigger paycheck, support from their extended family may not be available. Thus, kids will affect your performance at work, and arguably the same can be said if you have a still childless girlfriend at home who, for instance, insists on you not working so hard because she prefers eating at a restaurant several times a week, and surely does not want to do so on her own. The second issue is that you have plenty of time to become a father, and if you are doing financially well, you will have even more time to find a woman to settle down with. Probably once you reach your 30s you may want to seriously think about your future and if kids should be in it, but there is absolutely no reason to think you need to be firing on all cylinders in your chosen career and have your wife pump out one kid after another. Of course, I presume that you want to be somewhat involved in your kid’s life. Otherwise, you can pull a Mel Gibson, have nine kids, work like a maniac, and amass half a billion dollars. Elon Musk is another high-status guy with a lot of kids, but just like with Mel, you can assume that he probably does not spend a lot of time changing diapers.

As I thought more about the situation of this guy, it struck me that the very same reasoning also applies to anyone who makes a comfortable living. After this coaching call, I spent some time recollecting how friends, acquaintances, and clients fared who put off the question of having children all throughout their twenties and sometimes even their 30s. According to the anecdotal evidence I have gathered, there is not a single guy who achieved a middle-class lifestyle and could not find a woman to knock up. If there were any issues, then it was simply about getting access to the dating pool but this can be remedied, albeit you will find it impossible to replicate the quantity and quality of women you encountered in college. In the end, it normally does not take long for a guy in this age group to find a woman for a long-term relationship. Granted, sometimes those men made sub-optimal choices, but that would be a different issue.

I would even go so far to say that men in their mid-30s are the most attractive on the (long-term) dating market. At this age, you will still look quite alright, in particular if you have taken good care of yourself. In addition, you have fulfilled a good part of your potential already. In contrast, if a woman in her mid-20s goes for a guy much closer to her age, she essentially buys a lottery ticket. Sure, there are indicators of future success, but there is really no guarantee that you will make it in life. There are plenty of mathematics geniuses who pursued PhDs at top universities and now work as substitute teachers somewhere, for instance. Also, I have seen quite a few smart and diligent students not get very far because they were too risk averse. By this I do not mean that they did not dare to join some startup with a questionable business model but instead that they were too timid to move to the capital or even go abroad. Thus, you can have pretty smart guys who hit a career dead-end basically with their first job already.

What I wrote above only applies if you are career-minded. If your goal is to hold down a job that allows you to have a comfortable life, there is nothing wrong with not wanting to climb yet another rung of the ladder. Interestingly, it is enough to remain at that level to become more attractive over time, as quite a few of the cool, bohemian guys who pulled all the hot chicks in clubs will not manage to get anywhere in life. An excellent example of this is Berlin, where a large part of the adult population lives off welfare. Just having a steady job that requires professional training thus already probably puts you in the top 25% of men.

Of course, the alternative and, bizarrely enough, evolutionarily more successful strategy, is to live off welfare, knock up as many women as you can, invest zero in them, and laugh at all the wage cucks who finance your life. In the West, most children are born in the underclass and as long as we do not fundamentally change society, i.e. scrap the welfare state, this will continue until the system collapses. Nonetheless, for the time being, Jamal who brandishes an IQ of 80 as well as a semi-automatic rifle, makes some dough on the side by slinging dope, and knocks up chicks in exchange for free weed or crystal meth is going to leave more children behind than any of us. He even makes an Ultra-Chad like Mel Gibson look like an amateur in that regard. In the end, society will pay for Jamal’s brood of 25 kids with 20 women. In the spirit of accelerationism, I wish him all the best, though.