“I’d stab someone in the eye for a full night’s sleep,” was the message I received early Tuesday morning from my friend. He and his wife recently had a baby boy, a cute little guy named Evan that pisses and shits and has rewired their brains to do the silly things new parents do.

In the months leading up to the birth I watched him prepare to be a dad, while also making plans on how he’d attempt to continue with life as he was already living it. Now I watch him find respite in the cracks of time he’s able to secure, those plans since forgotten. Not that the loss seems to matter, he’s found a sort of contentment which vacillates between incomparable love and mental states which bring about the message above. Some may say he’s resigned himself, or had his this is my life now moment, but I think through the sleepless nights and fussing he’s finding a different sort of happiness.

There has been an increase of public talk in the last 50 years about whether to have a kid or not. People are putting it off longer or abstaining altogether for a variety of reasons, from the ebbing of social pressures to have children, to their impact on the environment. My friend, now in his 40s, with a wife not far behind, also waited. Equally, I have a number of friends who are in long term marriages and relationships and have no plans to have kids. Deciding for yourself whether to pull the trigger, as many might say, is difficult.

The practical reasons aside, I see the decision coming down to your tolerance for change, both good and bad. Not just the change from your life pre-child, though that’s certainly difficult, but the continual changes to the rhythm of daily life. A change that comes day by day and hour by hour to your mood, your level of anxiety, your sleep cycle, and to your ability to plan.

I believe my friend’s highs will be higher and his lows will be lower. He will have moments of watching his child grow that I’ll never get to experience, but equally he’ll have a level of anxiety about the future I’ll never reach. The former is what parents, hoping to be future grandparents, often focus on. When it comes to having babies, parents are the best sales people, and I can see how in the past, when our reach out into the world of opinions was smaller, we could have been more easily swayed into taking the leap.

Everything comes down to a trade off, and an infinitely branching future of choices where only a few are made. We can’t, unfortunately, live all lives simultaneously. We can’t taste all flavors of life, for better or worse, and the only thing we can do is look at where we are and what we want and make the best decisions we know how.