Until recently societies could only allow a small number of people to voluntarily not have children because death was so common. A society that could not produ

Until recently societies could only allow a small number of people to voluntarily not have children because death was so common. A society that could not produce enough children would eventually find itself lacking an adequate labor force to produce food or enough soldiers to defend against invasions. Individual happiness was less than a tertiary concern for most of human history; society needed people to reproduce and cultural expectations developed around that need. Our high-tech, modern world is very different from the historical norm.