Child

The more I study the works of men in their institutions, the more clearly I see that, in their efforts after independence, they become slaves, and that their very freedom is wasted in vain attempts to assure its continuance. That they may not be carried away by the flood of things, they form all sorts of attachments; then as soon as they wish to move forward they are surprised to find that everything drags them back. It seems to me that to set oneself free we need do nothing, we need only continue to desire freedom. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

Very frequently I get flashes of “This is exactly how I saw this when I was a kid” about random things. Sometimes specific things, like if I watch a video of a game I used to play when I was a kid, I’ll have a sudden flash of “how open the world seemed to me, how amazingly full of possibilities it was”, etc., along with a lot of (this is almost impossible to describe) “how just this weird shiny red patch on the health bar seemed so important, or special, or amazing”. I think I’m basically remembering fragments of a child really thinking and believing things like “If I just had a shiny mech suit like that I’d be so happy” or “I want to live in this space-sim world where everything is just chrome.”

I can’t explain it better than that. But it’s like a raw, pure feeling, except it’s localized in the thing I’m looking at, not in me. It’s passive. It’s not that I’m feeling a nice emotion, it’s that the game itself or song itself or whatever seems like it’s revealing that it actually has that something still in it, it’s just me who has forgotten how to see it. It’s like I’m going “Oh yeah, shiny mech suits in video games used to blow my mind! What happened?!? The mech suits are still there!”

It’s not possible to hold onto this emotion, or re-live either, it’s always as if it appears just to slip away again, already on the edge of slipping back away when I notice it. But I get this all the time, even for random stuff. Sometimes the way a street looks from a certain angle will suddenly make me remember, not a specific memory of being on the street I grew up on, but the general feeling I had all the time of “this is a place where adventures can happen”, in which the way the green trees were swaying had some secret meaning to it. Or I’ll remember the vibe contained implicitly in thinking that the world was massive, that the busy area beyond where my friends and I used to play was a dangerous exciting place (instead of just some suburbs). I am actually getting a fragment right now just from thinking about this stuff to write the article, it’s specifically how the way the concrete and buildings at school looked when I was a kid. I can almost touch the feeling/thought but then it slips away again.

My running hunch is that we as adults correlate things and turn the entire world into a coherent model, eventually leaving no place for mystery to remain. But it’s got to be more than that.

Maybe societal expectations ruin it. It’s hard to explain but after reading Rousseau’s Emile, a book about a fictional child raised into adulthood by a fictional self-insert of Rousseau himself, it sort of just clicked for me. Societal expectations destroyed your inner child’s yearn for learning things; society told you that learning by yourself is bad and that you have to go to school.

Your inner child’s yearn for possessing some particular object you thought would make you super-powerful was destroyed by society expecting you to get a job and earn money. It is the inner child itself that yearns to abide by society out of the fear of being left out or becoming a recluse. Now there’s different degrees to what degree the inner child is destroyed, defeated, stopped from growing into an inner adult. This inner adult, the inner child that grew naturally into an adult is Rousseau’s idea of the natural man, not more and not less, and his book gives advice on how to raise such a natural man.

However, the bad news is that most people, you and me included, are far away from having grown an inner adult. More likely, our inner child stopped his development somewhere in childhood or early adolescence. If it were not so, we would still have an experience as bright as that of a child, at least that is the opinion of Rousseau, but with the ripeness and maturity of an adult.

Even though those feelings are still there, they can be no longer touched. Only craved.

Childhood has its own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education