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I'm going to take a general sentiment in a previous thread somewhat further.
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that having kids is the biggest and most successful disinformation campaign society has pulled on itself in all of history. Having kids is one of the worst things you can do to your short term happiness, up there with getting addicted to heroin or getting in a motorcycle accident. Whatever things you might have enjoyed in life before them is completely gone, for the rest of your life. Every waking moment of your life outside of work will be completely occupied by taking care of monstrous creatures that make every single bodily function besides breathing as difficult as humanly possible. Eating, sleeping, farting, shitting, drinking, etc. will each be a torturous ordeal that you will have to deal with multiple times per day. It's backbreaking, thankless, and absolutely positively unfulfilling. After having kids you will finally understand the men who work 18 hour days every day despite having kids. They're actually doing it because of the kids. Because work obligations are the only excuse they can give themselves to let them spend less time dealing with kids and instead doing something relaxing like writing TPS reports or updating excel spreadsheets. Getting into the office and getting a stack of work from your boss is sweet relief compared to the torture of taking care of the kids.
I'm pretty sure the lie around it has persisted for so long because of the corresponding hard social stigma against saying you absolutely fucking hate taking care of the kids. Anyone who even hints at that idea is going to get completely crucified in the comments section. It's like the Havel's greengrocer, where if he doesn't put up the sign with the approved message, he's going to get hauled off to the gulag. Except for parents the punishment will be worse.
Anyways I find it likely that the cratering of birthrates across the entire world is a mass viral sensation where the lie is breaking down. Likely fuelled by social media as well as other factors, people are finally realizing en masse (though not openly admitting it yet) that it seriously just sucks. Even the welfare queens and third world brown hordes realize that this is true for them too. And they're understandably picking the hedonism option.
And no I don't hate or dislike kids. Kids are great, as long as they're someone else's, and their parents are around to jump in and take care of it as soon as something goes wrong.
I find discussing this sentiment to be like the discourse around death, except much less compelling. Death is that thing that only those who have experienced it can describe, and those who haven't can only guess at. The catch is that once you've experienced it, you can't explain it to anyone else.
Kids are funny because, in contrast to death, every single person on this earth who has had them can tell you how they have affected their lives, and yet there's a subset of the population (apparently, you included) that will say that it's a lie. Literally all the parents I know, even those with difficult kids, find it much more meaningful and full of joy than they would have suspected. I say joy meaningfully, too. That word gets thrown around but the absolutely out-of-the-blue fun, happiness, and pride I feel when my kid picks up or says something new or outrageous is something that outweighs everything else in my life. These are things that people will regularly say, I'm far from the first, so I have no doubt it will do little to convince you; but I still find it funny.
There are bad parents, there are bad kids, and there are people who are a bad fit for parents happiness-wise, but the idea that a lie that has existed longer than written word has only just broken down as many other changes to our environment influence our behavior in curious and unnatural ways is laughable on its face.
I have a somewhat more involved theory (rather than a totally-unique-to-the-lie-filled-online-world awakening to the objective truth of things on social media) here.
How can we know whether it's a lie or the truth when saying it is impossible? People who aren't overjoyed by their kids are considered the worst of the worst, up there with pedofiles and rappists.
Two points:
1 - Even if the true joy of parenting is ineffable (unfortunately the case) you can get an approximation by experiencing them in some way. Maybe it's "Kid's say the darndest things", hanging out with neices/nephews, or just being attentive at a playground while you eat a picnic lunch. This is hard, but I've already had 4 things happen today (despite having a job and typing out this reply) that I would classify as super cool and worth it.
2 - Think about how many people have to lie consistently over thousands of years for your thesis to be true. In the entirety of human history... wait, no, in the entire history of this planet for every form of life, Parenting has been worth it. And yet, only with the advent of social media and the mass delusional influence of women it enables in just the past 15 years... now we've finally woken up to the fact that procreating actually sucks? Just use your common sense here. How likely is that?
Every group that figured out the lie ended up extinct
Presumably this is also what happened to every group that decided that "being alive is neat" was a monstrous lie also ended up, only slightly more quickly.
Or perhaps beliefs that lead directly to "going extinct" aren't just bad but also incorrect.
Beliefs that lead to extinction cannot be widely accepted in a society for more than a short period of time, for obvious reasons.
That doesn't mean they're necessarily wrong.
Additionally beliefs that enhance survival are not necessarily correct or true.
Generally speaking, beliefs that are incorrect do not enhance survival and, if sufficiently delusional, detract from it. (A very trivial observation, but if it were otherwise we should have no particular confidence in our ability to arrive at the truth at all.)
Similarly, it would be unsurprising if the human mind and body was not at least somewhat well-adapted to its natural habitat (which, for most of human history, was surrounded by family). And there are of course reasons (from social science research) to think that having children does not necessarily decrease happiness and may even increase their happiness and their lifespan.
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