Don’t get too hung up on it. While it’s cool to be a great grandparent, a great grandparent has tons of grand kids, and a lot of them don’t really give that much of a shit about you at the end of the day unless you’re some kind of interesting person. No descendants will care about you as much as your immediate children. I love my grandparents, but barely see them or talk to them even knowing the time is short.

Think of the advantage of having kids later: Your kids get to be born into a deeper and better future, and may some day enter the 22nd century, lucid and able.

This is a really good point. You can have at it all but you can definitely wish ;)

Well, what's life but not a sequence of "pick your own adventure" choices.

But live for yourself and what you think is good. It's always a tradeoff. Having your grandparents at your wedding is nice, sure, but you can't optimize for everything.

My great grandmothers were alive until I was in my 20s, but they were like, practically in arranged marriages when they were 14.

I know this is an extreme example but, talk about downsides!

Is it? Every study on arranged marriages I've seen points to lower divorce rates and higher general happiness. Assuming your parents aren't assholes they'll try and do right by their kids. And the nice thing about an arranged marriage is that it's two people not following some illusions of effortless love and happiness, but two people coming together to collaboratively build that love and happiness.

Uh, yeah.

One of my great grandmothers was in an actual arranged marriage at age 14 to a man who was like 60 years old. She managed to get out of that one, but had to marry another man (my great grandfather, who I never met) to do it.

It was a different world back then, but compressing generations to the point where you are able to know your great grandparents usually requires some creative accounting that wouldn't fly for most people today.

It was a different world, but it sounds as though the first marriage was irrelevant to the timeline of you knowing her.

Perhaps, but possibly not - once she was "married off" she was no longer her parents' responsibility and had to marry again at a young age in order to survive.

My point is that multiple generations of people need to have children at very young ages - often under conditions where they lack agency - for you to know your great-grandparents. It was a great experience for me, but every generation before me had a hard life.

If three generations have kids at average age 22 then you need to be 88 to be at your great grand-child's wedding (if they get married at 22). It's younger than most of us do this these days - I got married at 31 - but there's no need for child brides. Your (very sad) example doesn't seem quite relevant, to my mind.

Having kids at 22 is a significant setback for most people, at least in America. Yes, not as bad as child brides, but it's certainly not the "easy path."