Generally, happiness is a reward from doing what your genes want you to do. The greatest happiness therefore, should be found in the process of breeding and caring for offspring.

Social status (consumption, skills and achievements) helps you secure higher quality mates and offers greater security to your offspring. That's why gaining social status, feels worthwhile, but without kids it feels a bit empty.

Before kids, I knew the breeding was pretty good fun, but my genes gave me no indication that having kids would be fun too.

Perhaps thats just to ensure those genes are spread far and wide and to concentrate on social status before the all consuming process of caring for offspring begins.