GM

As many have said, this is a personal decision for you and your husband. No one else’s decision should determine your decision. I’m sure that you and your husband will ultimately make the right decision for the two of you.

My wife and I are both 37 and have an almost-two-year old, so we were similarly situated to you and your husband not long ago. We live in a major American city, and most of our friends, including our married friends, don’t have kids. Some do, but not most.

When it comes to deciding whether to have a child, there isn’t a concrete, universally applicable decision-making calculus, but I want to suggest one way NOT to make the decision. I think that people often visualize a scale. On one end are all the things that currently fill their lives and bring them happiness, e.g., hobbies, exercise, travel, reading books, spending time with friends, trying new restaurants, going to the bar, leisure time, disposable income generally, etc. On the other end is the potential happiness of having a child. People add it all up and try to predict which way the scale will tip. Do NOT do this.

It’s a category problem. The happiness that you have in your life now is NOT the happiness that a child could bring you. It’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. My wife and I (and, I’d wager, most parents) continue to love all the things that they had in their lives before their children. When our daughter was born, we had a lot less time for those things, and in that narrow sense, our happiness diminished. We hope to get that particular happiness back one day as our daughter grows up (and any subsequent child grow up), and as we have more time to pursue our interests and distractions again. Make no mistake: you cannot have a young child and continue living the same life that you did before.

You state in your question, “We have some friends who have kids, and most seem more depressed than they were before they had kids,” and that having kids is “privately experienced as a massive toll on life.” I’d respond that this is not the right framing. My wife and I would concede that we are often more stressed and more haggard than our peers without children, but we aren’t “more depressed” or anguished about any “massive toll on life.” Having a (young) child often means less immediate happiness. You spend almost all your time caring for your child; you still have to conduct your own life to varying degrees; you get sick a lot more often; and you’re always tired. But the happiness that you receive from your child and all those small moments with your child make up for what you’ve lost and often exceed it. I’m not saying that having a child is more fun, quantitatively, than all the great things about life without a child. Having a child is categorically different, and if it’s something that you want to do, it’s better—at least, in our experience.

TLDR: When deciding whether to have a child, don’t try to compare your current, childfree happiness with your potential, child-laden happiness. They are not the same thing. When you have a child, you will, to a certainty, have less of the happiness that you know now, but you could very well, for a long time into the future, have immensely more happiness of a heretofore unknown variety.