I don’t know about y’all, but man, I miss being a kid. A friend of mine sent me a clip from the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. And the clip was basically talking about how the movie is now 35 years old. That kind of stuff doesn’t make me feel old. Like when people are like, “Oh, this movie came out, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago or this song’s 40 years old now.” I don’t feel old when people tell me that kind of stuff. But it does make me miss being a kid.
The Simplicity of Childhood
The reason it makes me miss being a kid is, number one, things were much simpler. And that’s the obvious answer. That’s what most people go to when they think about being a child is that life was so simple. We didn’t have worries. All this stuff that’s going on around us, all this crazy stuff that we’re dealing with in our world today, we simply weren’t tuned into it.
It’s not something we even thought about. It’s not something we had to deal with. It’s not something we even heard. It’s like selective hearing. We probably heard that stuff. We probably heard it going on around us, but it was in one ear, out the other. Maybe that’s how we should start living today.
Unapologetically Ourselves
Another big reason is because we were able to be ourselves very unapologetically. Kids are very expressive. They express what’s on their mind and we’re told to keep it down. Don’t stand out. Be another face in the crowd. Don’t be disruptive. Is it wired to go to the mall alone or do things differently? Calm down. You’re too hyper. You’re too excited.
All these things we’re taught and we’re told, they eventually suppress that expressive part of ourselves. And we continue to do that until that becomes a habit. And then before you know it, we can’t properly express ourselves. We can’t be ourselves. We can’t show our true personality and be the person that we are deep down. And that can be a big problem.
That’s one big reason why a lot of people resort to drinking because when they go out and they’re trying to talk to women or they’re trying to loosen up and have a good time, they can’t do that because our entire lives we’ve spent suppressing a part of ourselves that we were told is disruptive.
Limitless Possibilities and Big Dreams
Another big reason I miss being a kid is because the world seems so big and the possibilities seem limitless. You know, as an adult, I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve traveled all over the world, more times than I could possibly count. And when you do that, the world just kind of shrinks. It seems kind of small because everything’s accessible. But through that, you also realize what’s possible and what’s not.
You start to see things realistically and you start to set realistic expectations for yourself. But when you’re young and you’re not influenced by all these things and you don’t have all that life experience, everything seems possible. You want to be a firefighter, be a firefighter. You want to fly to the moon, be an astronaut. It feels like having super powers. Fly to the moon. You want to be a pilot, guess what? Sky’s the limit.
All these things are right at our fingertips. But as we get older and we gain life experience, we realize some things are kind of out of reach. And not all of us can attain those things, those dreams that we had when we were kids. But having that mindset back then, it was so freeing because it just made you really happy because it made you feel like that anything you wanted to accomplish, you could accomplish.
Encouragement vs. Reality
For most people growing up, if you had a loving family that was supportive, they would usually encourage you. They would encourage you to be that firefighter or to take yourself to the moon, to be an astronaut, to be a pilot, to do all these things when you get older, when you grow up. You can be whatever you want to be. That’s what we’re told.
Sometimes the cards just aren’t in our favor to make those things happen. And I’m not saying that your dreams can’t be realized because anything is possible. And if you want to be an astronaut, you absolutely can. But the realists in us start to make us realize how hard it’s going to be. And certain life circumstances may kind of hold us back from being able to reach for the stars and go after those big dreams that we had when we were kids.
The Loss of Imagination
But one of the best parts of having those big dreams when we were kids is the fact that our imaginations and our minds were just able to run wild. If we could dream it up, we could make it a reality. As children, we were so creative. And I really think that’s just because we were so free. We were free and we had the time to let our imaginations run wild.
We weren’t distracted by all these things that we’re distracted with now in our modern society. And not even just our modern society, but all the things we’re distracted with as we get older in general because we have responsibilities. We have to take care of the family. We got to pay the bills. You know, we got to do all these things. We got a job to show up at. We got to make money. We have to fulfill our role in society. And we have to be stuck in the rat race.
And that can really tank your imagination because your mind’s on other things. We don’t really allow ourselves that downtime to let our minds run wild. So, this stupid Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle clip that my friend sent me, it really got me thinking about all this stuff. And I really started wondering like, how can we get back to this?
Getting Back to That Feeling
How can we get back to that feeling that we had when we were kids when we were able to let our imaginations run wild? We were able to reach for the stars and dream big and set these big goals for ourselves and we were able to unapologetically be ourselves. How do we get back to that?
And after thinking about this for a while, I started to realize that I really think it’s just as simple as allowing ourselves to have downtime, to have time to just be, to just exist, to be present, and to let our mind rest. Because in the modern world and in modern society, we’re always distracted. We have our phone in our hand. We’re scrolling social media. We’re actively caught up in the hustle culture. We’re chasing something. We’re going to work. We’re coming home. We’re doing stuff around the house.
We never allow ourselves to fully rest. And the problem with that is that dopamine is actually created when we’re at rest. And if we don’t take some downtime to let that replenish itself, then we just become very depleted. All those happy imaginative thoughts, they become less and less because we don’t have the bandwidth to think about anything else other than the stuff that we’re scrolling or the things that we’re actively working towards or all the hustling that we’re doing.
### Breaking the Cycle of Complacency
It just depletes our mind and takes us out of being able to have those thoughts and have that imagination and that can cause us to get stuck to just become very complacent and docile. We become comfortable in those cycles and we build habits around them and then it can be very hard to break free from that. So what I’ve been making it a point to do more recently is just give myself more downtime, give myself permission to just not do anything for a period of time and feel okay about it because I’m one of those people.
I fall into that trap where I always feel like I need to be actively working towards something and I need to be productive and if I’m not, I’m wasting my time. But now that I’ve started to distance myself from social media and my phone and pretty much anything with a screen, it’s had a profound impact on my mood overall. And that’s a place we should all strive to get back to getting back to how we were as a kid.
| Feature of Childhood | Feature of Adulthood |
| :— | :— |
| **Simplicity** | Life was simple; no worries about the world. | **Complexity** | Tuned into global issues and crazy events. |
| **Expression** | Unapologetically ourselves; very expressive. | **Suppression** | Told to keep it down; fear of standing out. |
| **Possibilities** | Limitless; sky is the limit (Astronauts/Pilots). | **Realism** | Realistic expectations; recognizing life’s hardness. |
| **Imagination** | Minds ran wild; creative and free. | **Distraction** | Responsibilities, bills, rat race tank imagination. |
Living Without Fear of Judgment
That fearlessness, the imagination, and all that ambition we had, that should be at the forefront of everything that we do. Because most of the time the reason we suppress parts of ourselves is because we fear judgment from others. We’re afraid what other people might think. Or we were told that because we have those qualities, we don’t fit in with society. And we need to get rid of those qualities and be normal so we can fit in.
But life is way too short to care about what other people think. Because at the end of the day, we’re all going to wind up in the same place. Nobody gets out of this alive. And when you’re on your deathbed and you’re looking back at your life, you’re not going to care about what somebody said about you or whether or not you fit in. You’re going to care about what you did with your life.
Did you get out of life everything that you wanted? And the only answer to that that’s going to matter is if that was a yes or a no. If it was a yes, you’re going to be fulfilled. If it was a no, you’re going to have a lot of regrets. And the worst part about that is that once your time’s up, you can’t go back and undo it. What’s done is done.
So, what it all boils down to is we all just need to get back to the way that we were when we were kids. We need to make more time for ourselves so that we can let our imaginations run wild. We can get that fearlessness back. We need to dream big and we need to remember that anything is possible. So, I know I’m not the only one this happens to. So, if you have a song or a TV show or a movie that sparks those childhood memories and takes you back to that simpler time and place, share that in the comments below.