Chris

I express or rather expressed regret about having kids all the time and nobody wanted to hear it either.
Having kids out of FOMO is a bad idea.
Ultimately it comes down to the person you are, the life you want, and what you take satisfaction in. It’s a job like any other except it comes with a 20 year contract. It’s not for everyone and I wish people who rave about it point that out.

We’re not outdoors people but we often joke that our 7 year old boys are bums. They don’t want to go do anything.
We’ve been working on this for a few months so it’s a good time for me to organize my thoughts on how we’re changing things.
I think kids at this age cannot reason around anything resembling longterm consequences and it’s unreasonable to expect them to. Even adults struggle with doing what’s right for them sometimes. I realized that we can’t expect our kids to understand the consequences of never learning to swim when they don’t go to swim class or that they won’t have anything to eat if we don’t go to the store to buy food.
Once we accepted that, we decided that certain things are just going to be mandated. This is still subject to the always correct parenting adage to choose your battles, but some battles are worth choosing so we now:
1. Don’t expect them to like doing some of this stuff. This is important for our sanity. If we expect them to like going to the store and doing it happily, then we’ll rarely be satisfied ourselves because even if they go they won’t be happy about it.
2. With #1 in mind, we will still expect them to do some of these things. I’ve told the kids that I expect them to go to swim class until they know how to swim, then after that they get to choose. We also expect them to go with us to run errands and shop for the family as part of the family. It’s OK to not like those things, but you’re going to have to do them anyway.
3. Our hope is that over a bit of time, they will also come to accept those things and settle into some healthier habits around them.

It’s been working alright. Whining around going to swim class is down over time. Whining about going to the store is still there but less prolonged.

I think you can do something similar with a 4 year old. Just don’t expect them to love it, at least for a while.