The Brutal Truth About Kids and Happiness

What is the truth around happiness, marriage, and kids? >> happier you get happier when you get happier >> No, not true. Especially women and take a happiness hit when they have kids and diapers. >> not. Their happiness No, intentional fertility causes a rise in happiness. The problem is we mix unintentional and intentional fertility in the data. It's very difficult to separate because you don't have preferences. I guarantee you in longitudinal data happiness rises short-term. In the long run it's a little more ambiguous because happiness scales reset over time. Happiness rises with engagement. That is it rises before marriage basically but then marriage locks it in. If you don't get married the happiness of a cohabiting union rapidly returns to baseline. The happiness of a married union tends to remain above baseline as long as you remain married which people don't always. But widowage and divorce tend to return you to your premarital happiness level. There's three different longitudinal surveys I can demonstrate all this in. Having kids that you want to have which is a big stipulation. Unwanted kids, unintended kids is a different dynamic. But having kids you want to have increases happiness in the most robust models we know of. Unintended fertility is a different beast. And it is true that in every in almost every survey unless you add like a million controls where you're basically controlling away the effect of having kids people with kids are happier. And one reason is because happier people have more kids. >> Especially when there's like abundant child care in that in that country. >> Yes, yeah, more social support increases the happiness. >> where there's less social support which is like the modern developed country like in the United States where you're not really getting a lot of help especially if you're a middle class or above woman women especially do take a short-term hit per the research that I've seen and then it goes up over the long run. But I think this focus on hedonistic happiness is is overrought. And again it's cultural. You have to look for meaning beyond that. And I mean we also have to look at really pragmatic solutions here. >> I would say meaningfulness is more important. >> talk about broken dating markets but like what are we going to can't we can't fix it. I mean, what my my husband and I literally have an index of other parents with kids close to our age who are going to intermarry our children. My new wave of skeezing on people is like, I want our children to intermarry. Like, where we Parents used to be very involved in matchmaking their children. And we So, we have to talk about what are we actually going to do? Cuz we can't fix the swipe-based dating model. That's gone. It's done. Uh what we're trying to do now is just manually matchmaking again. Maybe bring back the London season. We used to talk about that. It is totally coming back. Arranged marriages People are like I mean, zoomers are like, "Sign me Where do I sign up for the arranged marriage group you guys have?" Like, it is it is a real and big thing. Church is a big thing. Honestly, like [laughter] Catholic colleges, religious colleges are like the new hottest place to find a spouse. I mean, we need to look at what practically to do. Cuz we can talk about this big problem. The whole thing is like, "So what? I guess I'm going to like die alone and and without any sort of support or I'm never going to marry." There are many things that people can do now. And that's what's important, too, is this is a wicked problem. It's very scary. But like with every endemic and existential problem, there are manageable things that you can do. Like, if you're worried about, you know, changing sea levels, like maybe we should look at like managing um a mass migration and getting people off coastlines and shifting the home insurance market and shifting regulation expecting it to happen. We need to look at how we on a micro and macro level are going to manage falling and declining fertility rates and our own personal lives based on the expectation of that. And I think too much of the discussion around demographic collapse is like, "Is this a real problem? Like, how bad is it? Let's all like ruminate on that." When really it's like, "Okay, well, what are we going to do?" And some of the solutions are very radical. Like, literally arranged marriages sounds kind of crazy, but this is what we've come to. And I think very similar to COVID, people are like, "Oh, this will like blow over in a couple months." And like the world shuts down. This is another COVID. You You think this can't possibly get super bad. It's not going to be be so crazy. It's going to be profoundly more crazy than COVID. This is cities crumbling. this is pension funds falling apart, this is people dying en masse, millions and millions of people. Uh we need to realize that but then also just actually plan for that. No more performative pronatalism, actual pronatalism. >> on the dying en masse. I just want to mention cuz I don't know if if all listeners will will get this. In industrialized countries, our social support systems are probably good enough, probably, that for the most part most old people will kind of get through. It's places like Thailand where fertility is below one and the money is not there to support a big social security system for old people. That's and where the health system is not as strong or like India or increasingly [snorts] African countries, those are the places where the death toll will become apocalyptic. >> Well, I I I I agree places like Thailand are in for an extraordinary level of old age loneliness and challenges. India, my gosh, my worry about India population right now is its aging population two three decades from now. No one's thinking about that. That's a humanitarian crisis uh is a ticking time bomb. But in terms of happiness, I think one of the things we have to isolate out here is the 10% of people who don't want children. Now, in making the birth gap documentary, I interviewed five six women 40s 50s who had never wanted a child ever. And they're completely happy. And >> That's why I emphasize wanted children. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh so when you average happiness across women and don't separate those out, you're kind of missing something. Now, tho- those people who don't want women or who don't want children, I believe it's almost binary. Uh now you you change from not wanting kids >> Everyone has a price. But a a a life that's hedonistic and single and childless can be perfectly fun and we should design around that. >> Super fun. >> I mean like our it's incredibly fun. >> I think though that the the people who never ever ever have the desire, there is something that means that they will be happy. >> Yeah. >> Whether they have kids or not. That does not manifest itself. And those people are just postponing it. >> We're they're going to be super happy. And like we're we're big pronatalist. All of our time now is in developing or we're doing like we're building an AI platform. It's it's called Ourfa B AI. We're trying to replace humans, replace employees, replace husbands and wives. Like you can see this all happening with other people who are in AI as well, who are also pronatalist. They're investing in all this reprotech. They're having a lot of kids themselves. Meanwhile, they're also replacing humans for all the people who choose to not create new humans, to not own the future. And those people I think AI can be this literal deus ex machina that's coming in and going to correct for a lot of this. A lot of the loneliness, a lot of the lack of happiness. These people are going to die in their little pleasure pods with their fake families or their fake realities. And they're going to be happy and I want them to be happy. And we're literally trying to build things to make them happy. >> Are you Do you want them to be happy? >> I was going to say I think it's gross when people aren't happy. It's very like disruptive. Their cries are annoying. Um so I I do. I want them I want I I believe in for example euthanasia. I love this. I love I love euthanasia. >> No, I think it's terrible. >> It's Oh, it's beautiful. >> terrible. No, it's the smartest thing Canada ever did. >> No, and we're that's going to be the solution to healthcare in the future. >> No. >> But I I I I think it creates a society where I already see it. I've heard it from young people in Japan who are looking older people saying, "Why are they still here?" >> No, really. They they need to We need maid in Japan. We need maid in We need >> Without pain and euthanasia, I think it's worth noting like just a second ago I was saying, "Well, kids might make happiness." And you said, "Well, we shouldn't prioritize happiness so much." But when it comes to euthanasia, well, people shouldn't be unhappy. But I would say, "No, old people, you know, suffering people, their unhappiness is not a problem. Meaningfulness is ultimately the greatest value and I think we can argue is suffering meaningful or not. But earlier you said, you know, suffering, the avoidance of you know, negative utilitarianism, the avoidance of suffering is a kind of bankrupt view and I would agree. I would just strongly agree and say, whatever the broader wisdom of euthanasia and I think it's a whole debate which we can do if you want to. >> I want to see that book be written, the wisdom of euthanasia. >> It is I would just say that it's not about suffering or happiness because ultimately what truly makes human lives worthwhile is not the quotient of their suffering or the number of their utils, it is meaningfulness and it is the things that they build of benefit for others. >> the ones who lack meaning get out of the way. All right. And this is not like I will die by my own hands if I'm lucky enough to live long enough when I'm no longer useful. I will end myself. It's not, but >> So, one of the one of the problems that I see with that again is that there are certain people who have not through really any fault of their own had a 90% of women want to have kids, right? Around about four in five childless women who breach the top of their reproductive threshold say that they didn't have kids say that they wanted to. 10% can't, 10% don't want to, 80% did. It seems to me that we kind of have a duty to try and help people live the better lives that they got. It's the same reason that we tell people that smoking's bad for them. The same reason that they tell people that they should moderate their alcohol. It's the same reason that we tell people they should get 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night. And that to someone that's in a health desert or someone that's in the equivalent of an information desert this is the same for 80% of women who reach menopause, can't have kids and didn't have kids, 80% of them Is this still correct, this data? >> Yes. So, and to me even if we were to solve this phenomenon through, let's say, people having larger families, those who do have families, and we still have this contingent, large contingent, of people who dreamed of having families and end up childless for life. That's still a major crisis to me that we still need to address. >> bad enough. Look, there are No, no, no, no, no. I'm super infertile. I have five kids. How does that work? We made it work. We slept on a mattress on a floor for a year. >> someone to do that with. >> You You can do it by yourself, and we've met so many people who have. >> No. No, no, no. >> Well, but hold on, you can do it by yourself, but let's go back to this. People don't just want kids, they want a specific kind of family. They might want it very, very badly. So, in What you have is beautiful for you all, but it's not what everyone is going to want. >> Then they can go out and get it. >> But my point is some people's version of family that they want is not something you can just take. >> Before we continue, as you're probably aware, I'm not a massive drinker, at least not anymore. But, even if you too are not drinking, sometimes you just want something cold, frosty, and tasty without the fear of a hangover the next day, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. Thank you very much. Their non-alcoholic brews taste just as good as the real thing. They've got IPAs, hazy goldens. They're so good that you'll forget that there's no alcohol in them until you wake up the next day feeling fantastic. It means that you can enjoy the ritual without the wreckage. No hangover, no 3:00 a.m. panic, no wasted Sunday recovering from Saturday. That is why I partnered with them. 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