Wow, so glad I could be helpful, and my goodness thank you for popping my reddit gold cherry! Since I too am in a place of figuring this out and constantly stressing about it, I have been reading a lot of /r/childfree, but yours was the first post that reminded me of myself so much and so I felt the need to respond. I too am career driven, high sex drive and wanting to travel. It was also very good for me to write it all out like that I guess, it helps form my own thoughts about it.

I think the riskiness of having children is something that sticks with me. It feels like a gamble and I am always thinking about the percentages, the drawbacks, not the positives ... will my relationship with my wife change to something I don't want, will my children be healthy, will my passions get swallowed up because I'm spending all my time raising my children, will my life feel empty even though I have people all around me ... again there are many people out there who bypass all that thinking and just feel confident and fulfilled in their decision to make a child (whether they've really thought it through or not) and they see all the potential drawbacks as secondary. When I see a life with a wife and children, I sometimes do get warm and fuzzy and happy and sentimental about it and I feel it as a wonderful thing. But I'm also realistic about how many hours there are in a day, how many dollars I will make, how energy I have and how many days I have left to live. I'm worried that having children will kind of mean an early death/prison sentence if it's not something I'm happy with ...

Here's a thought, and it may not be applicable to you so ignore it if it's not. I noticed in some of the other replies you talking about how you are afraid to be lonely later in life, afraid of not having a certain type of relationship when your parents are gone. I too dread not having that relationship with a parent, but it's funny, I never once thought about replacing it with a new one with my child. I don't come from a large family so it's different for me, but I think that many people (and possibly yourself included) see family as "life", people around you, full of life, laughter, stories, etc ... and a lack of people around you as "death", since as we get older, we lose more loved ones, relationships can get strained as everyone moves on with their lives, and having children is something that pulls everyone together, rallies your siblings around you and your kids, rallies the grandparents, other families, etc. I think sometimes it comes from a fear of death, which is of course natural, but maybe for some people a way of coping with the inevitability that we die alone is to have children, to extend the family, to literally extend the family's life. For some people, family is absolutely everything to them, literally everything, and so they must must have kids, it's just who they are. But we have to make sure that we have kids for the right reasons. And a fear of regret, a fear of loneliness, a fear of death, these aren't necessarily good reasons. I totally understand them, they have their hooks in me quite often, and there is something genuine about fear, but we can't let it dictate our lives. If you craft your life the way you want it, and fill it with family around you, make it a priority, that life will always be there, and you will still have space in your life for travel, sex and your career.

You should also know that whatever you decide, remember that it's simply great that you are thinking about all this, rather than letting it all wash over you and not making your own decisions about your future.

One last thing that comes up on here a lot, but it's very true: if you don't have children now, you can always change your mind and have them later, adopt, foster, etc. If you have children and then change your mind, you are fucked.