Where Does the Magic Go as We Grow Older? (2020)

“Kids don’t care about money” um absolutely not true in my experience, I know several kids (8 years old) and all they care about is cold hard cash or buying stuff on Fortnite.

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the magic is very much right where it always is,its everywhere and in everything but never the same twice, so pattern recognition shows you other things instead, simpler things that are just the infill in an otherwise very busy and energetic world, its too much for most and they grow out of the pre verbal ,pan optic stage that marks all humans in some way

I personaly, have never stoped building stuff, there is no break from snow forts to living in vans and buses, I have a house, but I camp in it, I had to trick the power company into taking there wires off it, but hey ,I knew I didnt need it, because light comes down out of the sky and then something something ,photovoltaic and I can charge my phone and make food cold or hot

I would posit that the imperative to “grow up” is in fact part of the problem. As children become adults they’re repeatedly told to “be realistic” and follow well-worn paths taken by numerous others in attempt to avoid “failure”. Don’t do the thing you’ve dreamed about since you were a kid, become a doctor/lawyer/developer/etc. Don’t discover yourself and explore the possibilities, stick to what’s “safe”.

This systematically douses natural sparks and transforms achievable goals into unreachable fantasies. People increasingly can’t imagine themselves breaking outside of the box, pushing boundaries, and changing the world, because the world has told them that they can’t and that they're best off not even trying.

> I have wondered a bit about why a sheet of typing paper folded into a paper airplane had as much appeal as it did when I was young. I think the kind of poverty of youth (my single, working-mom, a secretary, sneaking home the paper for me) forced a kind of creativity on me. We all made do with what was around the house.

This may be presumptuous of me because I obviously don't know your head, but I think you've missed the mark here, even though you know the secret when hoping you've passed the magic on to your kids. Exploration. The paper airplane isn't exciting because you have to make do, it's exciting because it's an avenue for exploration. How can I make it go further? What happens if I throw it upside down? What if I throw it from high up? Can I get it to curve? There's also a degree of self competition (i.e. if I can do X can I do X+1?)

It's easier when we're younger because there's so many more things to explore and so many things are so new we don't yet know what we don't like to explore. As we get older, we remove things from the list of things we're willing or able to explore, and our level of exploration must go deeper in order to be as magical since we know the surface stuff or can guess it pretty well. I think this also explains why adults can pull magic out of otherwise "boring" hobbies. Think stamp collecting or bird watching. And it's why we can find magic in things we thought were boring as a kid, because we're old enough now to explore what we once didn't understand.