nursery rhymes
by rantywoman
I’m vaguely acquainted with a strikingly good-looking woman whose big schtick was that she used to be a serious drug addict and involved in terrible relationships with sketchy men. In her thirties, she married a handsome man and had a baby. Now her Facebook feed is filled with cute photos of her kid.
I bring up this story because as much as people like to shame such women, her story puts a lie to the idea that there’s a right way to do things if one wants to end up married with kids. She’s beautiful, which helps, but I have another equally-as-striking friend who, while never going without a serious, monogamous relationship in her twenties and thirties, had her last relationship go bust right before the wedding and has ended up childless and never-married.
I currently take an exercise class from a cute, perky woman in her late twenties; she could play the girl-next-door in a romantic comedy. She was just asked out on a date by a dude who works in a coffee shop; her last boyfriend was a bartender. She is giving the coffee shop guy a chance but would like to find a man with a real career. She wants to have kids but is also happy, day-to-day, spending time on her own.
What advice did I have to give her? None. Absolutely none. I know of no guaranteed route of meeting (available) men with solid careers, nor would I necessarily recommend that she grab the first one who comes along, regardless of attraction, because of the ticking clock. I wouldn’t tell her to forget the guy from the coffee shop, either, although my guess is that it won’t pan out. In many ways she seems headed down my own path, but plenty of other women who seemed the same to me at that age ended up getting married and having kids, some as late as their forties.
There seems to be little rhyme or reason to it all, despite our desire to believe otherwise.
thebitterbabe 
Spot on. There is no rhyme or reason to anything in life, no matter how much we’d like it to be otherwise.
A person could eat healthful foods, not smoke, not drink, not take drugs, exercise and do everything ‘right’ and still die young from some painful and nasty form of cancer.
To suggest that anyone might follow a set of steps to get a desired outcome in life only works in fairly limited scenarios, things like if you go to university, study hard, you’ll get a degree. But most of life is not so ordered and has far too many variables. Which is a pity, because it would be so much easier if it were not this way. We could all have the success in whatever area of life we wanted, if all it took to have it occur was to follow a particular set of steps.
The best you can ever hope to do is ‘maximise your chances’ of a certain outcome, but you can always still lose each and every time.
Some people have nothing but good fortune throughout their life, landing by pure accident into one good situation after another, others might have the exact opposite, where things just seem to go from bad to worse, and most have something in between.
On advice as a subject, another aspect I consider is the fable of the man, the boy and the donkey. It’s clear you cannot please everyone all the time, and since what you do will not even have the power to ensure a certain outcome, you might as well aim to please yourself first.