Is it selfish to choose not to have kids?

Regret is the topic nobody wants to touch, so let me touch it. The studies on childfree regret are genuinely mixed, and anyone claiming certainty is selling something. But the qualitative research keeps surfacing the same quiet theme among the elderly childless: not dramatic despair, just a specific, low-grade ache at holidays, at funerals, at the moments when a family's continuity would have meant something. Meanwhile the regret of parents is loud, well-documented, and socially permitted to be expressed. We have built a discourse where one kind of regret is unsayable and the other is a genre. That asymmetry should make us suspicious of the consensus.