On Childlessness Is Awesome And I Love It
I thought the upshot of this article was actually a useful insight. The psychologist spake: "I think this boils down to a philosophical question, rather than a psychological one...Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?" (pg 6 online) Like Choire, I value the moment-to-moment happiness. Doubling down on "retrospective evaluations" seems uninviting to me, but I understand it as a valid choice. To me this is the conversation worth having...preferably over a Belgian beer in a dark room...the problem is that parents can't be there to have the conversation anymore (at least my friends-who-are-parents).
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On Where Have All the Sontags Gone?
I agree with most of what you say here, but here's a thought--his article got you to produce this piece on The Awl. Perhaps he's a bit more savvy about how to provoke the Online Critical Industry than you suspect? Making these kinds of polemical, under-researched claims is exactly what produces thoughtful online response (and less thoughtful rants) on webpages across the land. You're probably right that he's just stumbling backwards into this, but never underestimate the enemy.
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On Childlessness Is Awesome And I Love It
I definitely understand your point--and I actually don't think the article suggests that parents don't have daily happiness at all, but rather that the balance differs for the childless/parents. I thought it used the research to argue that parents' lives are more full of the kinds of frustrations, fears, and just plain chores than that of the childless, and having spent plenty of time with different types of parents/children, that seems intuitively true to me. The article also suggests the payoffs for those frustrations are real and significant, and that seems true too. As for the latter point, I think that there's a very wide range of how social parents are, based on personality, age of kids, etc., but that it's necessarily true that parents have less time to hang with their friends. I just miss seeing my friends out and about. Anyway, your points are all well taken!