When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

1 Corinthians 13:11

Imagination is The Meaning of Life

Have you ever noticed that as we grow old and embittered we begin to question why we exist? We start to look for meaning and purpose behind everything we do. Children don’t have that drive. They’ll ask the why of anything and everything else, but I have never had a child ask me, “Why do I exist?” No, children have no existential crisis because they’re too busy for that nonsense, there are too many things to think of. I think the reason that children never have an existential crisis is because they’re serving their purpose in life.

We exist to learn.

We are meant to use our minds to create and discover, without rules, without boundaries. The older we get, the more restrictions we place on ourselves, or society places on us. We are told to put away childish things and accept that our place in life is to grind away eight or more hours of our day, go home, cook dinner, and watch network television. We’re told to be another cog in the machine. We’re told that once we find our stable place in life that we are done learning.

I reject that.

To me, a stapler can always be a race car, and no matter what you tell me the rubber finger tip thingy on my desk looks like a dalek. If you just keep looking at the world around you, you can always find something new and cool to look at. Really, to be happy, you just have to let that imaginative kid inside you, the one that was in love with the infinite places a box could take you, and let him beat the crap out of the whiny teenager. Everybody hates whiny teenagers.