I don’t think it goes away; it just gets bigger. That being said, what probably kills the joy and fun in anything is monetization, and the internet is a clear example of that. Kids don’t care much about money, so fun is done for pure enjoyment. Adults' fun is ruined by money, greed, status, optics, and other factors. If you try to have pure fun as an adult, you are either seen as childish (and consequently not taken seriously when needed) or advised to turn such a fun hobby into a job or side hustle, eventually ruining the fun part of it.
I just sat through this years demosplash demo competition and the magic is absolutely still there. You're right, the lack of any monetary gain in the demoscene is a feature that keeps things interesting, quirky, and most importantly passionate. They optimize to wow and have fun, not to make a buck.
“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.
Generally agree with the article.
The magic never went away. As I got older though I needed more than a blanket fort to amuse me. As I got older I started building plastic model kits, balsa airplanes ... my mind went to imaging them as real, full-size.
Older still and I could afford a computer and, let me tell you, writing software that could amuse me, the coming of the BBS, and later the internet ... I had ascended well past the plane of blanket-fort.
Material means to buy these cooler "adult" toys ... and perhaps a slightly less fertile imagination that could allow a blanket to stand in.
Having kids was indeed a catalyst for me to build MAME machines, a dance pad (for the kids you know)... I enjoyed cracking open and reading each night Lang's colored Fairy Tale books to my three daughters, all with "eager eye and willing ear"....
As I have become older still (saw the birds leave the nest) and retired — 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.
I'm not sure then, as I say, that the magic has gone ... as I say, I just have the means now to large radio-controlled planes if I desire.
Like the fairy tales though, when I was younger I had hoped there was a Wonderland, somewhere, perhaps just behind a tree. It was in fact almost painful for me to fill my daughter's heads with fair tales when they were young. I knew on one hand how important they had been to my own imagination at their age even if I knew they were going to be in for a bit of a let-down.
My own final let down might have culminated when I was college-age actually. I remember seeing for the first time the "Walking Distance" episode of the original "Twilight Zone" and feeling my soul being shredded. But like the character in the episode, somehow I was able to find merry-go-rounds in the adult world.
There is magic out there, I found. It's in people, places I have not yet met or been to. And so too I hope I have also instilled a desire to travel and explore for my daughters.
> 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.
For me, I think it has to do with ..just having done more, experienced more.
When I built blanket forts as a child it was something new, my first attempt at building something. It was exiting to figure out how to do it, and enjoy the end product. After a few of those it became a bit more usual, and I started doing other things - play with model cars, build lego sets, etc.
I recently tried welding and I felt that same tinge of excitement - I'm gluing metal together! It's basically magic, I'm taking separate parts and turning them into one. I'm not welding purposefully or to build something, I just really like the act of welding.
Welding was new to me, I never experienced it. I think as a child I everything was new to me, the way welding is. I approached the world with a curiosity that drove me to play with it, to figure it out.
But now I've figured a lot of it out. It's not as fun to play with anymore, because I've exhausted all the angles of play I could come up with (and I did that a long time ago).
I still find that curiosity that drives me to play with something, to figure it out - but I have to look for it, find aspects of life I haven't experienced yet.
The World Cup when you’re 8 or 12 and not really seen one is incredible, at 40 it’s still great but I’ve seen 10 Euros or World Cup’s now and I still enjoy them, just not in the same fascination. Maybe I should try to see them through a new lens.
Magic comes not from building forts and tunnels to feel safe.
Magic comes from applying our creativity with real world objects and artistic and literary means to enrich the lives of ourselves and others, our equals, and of course, that little child who is mystified by everyday things.
We can be mystified by the cosmos, by little miracles we work every day helping others, and seeing everything unfold from some great mystic/scientific laws.
Joseph Conrad put it beautifully:
To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile — such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished — behold! — all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile — and the return to an eternal rest.The thing is, children have magical thinking in their playing, a blanket fort for example is full of possibilites and it feels like anything could happen — as we grow older we learn more and more that the number of things happening is limited.
That does not mean adults can have similar amazement, it just goes elsewhere.
I suspect that at age 8, merely draping a blanket over a coffee table (or a riding a magic dragon named Puff) is no longer as convincing a fantasy of Camelot as it was at age 3. Such fancies don't necessarily die off at some sell-by age; they evolve.
Video games and RPGs inherit that mantle for most (boys esp). Many turn to reading and writing fiction and watching films. Book reading is alive and well, the vast majority of which sustain what the OP suggests has been lost: the love of fiction, fantasy, and romance.
No, fantasy does not end with childhood. It transmogrifies to serve newfound passions that, hopefully, can still resonate forever with your meaning of life.
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 think your awareness shrinks. (And by awareness I mean attention. What you direct when you pay attention. What you concentrate when you concentrate. What gets jerked around when you are distracted).
You spend your whole life focusing on the important stuff / ignoring the unimportant stuff.
In this way you slowly whittle your reality down to a nub.
Also, much that was half-visible or vaguely-visible or almost-invisible gets discarded this way. That's a lot of reality.
Also, the "important stuff", in our society, tends to be mental stuff. Important ideas and plans and such. So by the time you're an adult you've discarded pretty much your whole reality except for a little mental videogame that you play until you die.
So it makes sense that an adult might suffer from reality starvation.
I agree that this is probably a major contributor. The human mind has only so much mental bandwidth available, and mere existence in modern society demands much of it. Whatever is left over is slowly consumed as responsibilities accumulate.
I believe that this loss is somewhat reversible, however. Whenever I take a vacation that serves as a hard break from practically all of my responsibilities, I notice that the color and details of the world begin to trickle back in. If only it were practical to remain in that state for extended periods.
It’s gone once you’ve done it and know how the magic works
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WTF?! Seriously...
It doesn't sound like the individual writing this article has actually grown at all.
Why are the millennial generations so lost in make believe?
The reason the "majic" went away, is because it never existed! It was a figment of your childhood imagination.
The real failure of those lost in make believe is that actual reality is about a billion times more enganging and offers about a trillion times the opportunity to see expanded horizons. But wasn't the huffulump so much better? 8-/
But the photo at the beginning tells it all: modern kiddults want a realaity as complex as green eggs and ham.
No wonder we're fucked...
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.