> But when you ask people directly whether or not they're happier with kids, they almost always say they are. It's as if they aren't fully aware about how unhappy they are with the kids.
It's as if having kids rewrote the utility function of the person, introducing a bug to pass the test suite ("self satisfaction") to allow for a wider diffusion of the behavior ("I'm so much happier now, trust me it's wonderful!"), yet in a flawed way (i.e. that's not robust to scientific inquiry, as you observed)