It is if you're dumb enough to have this as your definition of "happiness":
'When I mention this to Daniel Gilbert, he hardly disputes that meaning is important. But he does wonder how prominently it should figure into people’s decisions to have kids. “When you pause to think what children mean to you, of course they make you feel good,” he says. “The problem is, 95 percent of the time, you’re not thinking about what they mean to you. You’re thinking that you have to take them to piano lessons. So you have to think about which kind of happiness you’ll be consuming most often. Do you want to maximize the one you experience almost all the time”—moment-to-moment happiness—“or the one you experience rarely?”'
I mean, why let a little thing like "meaning" affect the decisions you make in life, right?
We all know how well focusing on immediate pleasure works in areas such as dieting, exercise, finance, career, etc. Why not apply the same logic to having kids, right?
'When I mention this to Daniel Gilbert, he hardly disputes that meaning is important. But he does wonder how prominently it should figure into people’s decisions to have kids. “When you pause to think what children mean to you, of course they make you feel good,” he says. “The problem is, 95 percent of the time, you’re not thinking about what they mean to you. You’re thinking that you have to take them to piano lessons. So you have to think about which kind of happiness you’ll be consuming most often. Do you want to maximize the one you experience almost all the time”—moment-to-moment happiness—“or the one you experience rarely?”'
I mean, why let a little thing like "meaning" affect the decisions you make in life, right?
We all know how well focusing on immediate pleasure works in areas such as dieting, exercise, finance, career, etc. Why not apply the same logic to having kids, right?