[pseudohadamard]

  Before kiddos I took the apriori belief that it would kinda suck. The belief was unassailable because I thought, evolutionarily, if it was fun to have kids it wouldn't be fun to make them - otherwise we'd endure unfun "making" because we know the having would be fun.

And you were right. Subjectively, having and raising kids is fun. Objectively, it's not fun at all, but your mind convinces you that it is otherwise no-one would do it. This has been extensively studied across different demographics, cultures, age groups, evaluation methods used, etc, and the result is robust, i.e. consistent across all of them. Starting at a baseline life satisfaction level, it drops drastically when the baby arrives, slowly recovers a bit, then there's another big drop at age three, another recovery when they start school (but still not back to the baseline again), a huge drop as they become teenagers, and finally recovery back to the baseline when they leave home.

One thing I'm not aware of any work on is how the perception goes when the parents know about this in advance, a bit like being told how the magic trick works before it's shown to you.

[jvanderbot]

So, what is "objective" fun. (Vs enjoying your subjective experience). Having kids is not "objectively fun" even though its "subjectively fun" because "my brain convinced me I'm having fun?"

Pull at that thread and you'll land on the central mistake I made with my prior beliefs, and also a ton of things like, you know, stoic philosophy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and mindfulness. etc etc. The subjective is all you have.

What you just told me contradicts the studies. Return to baseline happiness with some temporary dips does not match "you're not having fun stop believing you are".

It means "all the enormous and sudden life changes and things you give up to have kids are a momentary blip in the radar, made up for by the pleasure of having kids".

[pseudohadamard]

  Return to baseline happiness with some temporary dips does not match "you're not having fun stop believing you are".

The "temporary dip" is the entire time you have the children, let's say 20 years or so, and it's a pretty serious drop, not just a small blip. I'm not telling anyone to stop believing, it's just nature's way of making sure that we keep procreating and at the same time a very interesting phenomenon to observe. Nothing wrong with it.

[jvanderbot]

Oh a 20 year dip is new to me.

Here's a few cherry picked studies[1] there's a _bump_ in happiness that regresses to pre-kiddo levels permanently.

[2] Happy people with money have more kids, and people who have kids after 30 and with non-poverty wages are happier.

1. https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2012-013.pdf

2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5505668/

3. bonus: A heavily biased study showing overall increases https://ifstudies.org/blog/life-with-kids-is-better-analyzin...

There's a decent book on the baseline phenomenon called Happiness Hypothesis: Largely speaking you'll return to baseline levels of subjective wellbeing, but recall that fufillment is not subjective wellbeing.

Of course if you read The Atlantic (the same magazine that tells you to throw your kids art away and never get married, they'll say the opposite [4]

4. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/11/does-havi...

You wont be convinced. That's ok. I think we'll just disagree here. But, if you let these articles direct your life, or if I were to let them direct mine, we'd be fools.

This whole thread is honestly hilarious. "No sir, you are not happy, you are not fufilled, here is the data, sir"