Is it selfish to choose not to have kids?

The research on parental happiness is the debate's best-kept open secret. Study after study finds that parents report lower moment-to-moment well-being than non-parents, higher stress, worse sleep, and less satisfaction with their marriages, especially in the early years. The famous 'kids bring joy' finding mostly shows up when you ask about meaning, not happiness, and even that's contested. I'm not citing this to dunk on parents. I'm citing it because the entire moral pressure campaign rests on the folk belief that children reliably make life better, and the data says: it's complicated, the costs are real, and pretending otherwise is how you get miserable parents raising miserable kids.