The Lost Art of Being Childish

The best antidote to the algorithmic age

We humans all have flaws, at times we tend to do things that stem from a bad or even evil nature. Lying or stealing are acts where the wrongdoing purely originates from within the person that happens to commit them.

It looks like this is a constant for all the bad traits that people have, we get angry or feel an impulse which leads us to do something that we know is bad. Naivety seems to be the only exception to this, as being naive isn’t inherently bad, it doesn’t stem from an evil impulse. The big difference being that the source of naivety is actually virtuous: Trusting others and seeing the good in them.

We are in a sense all born naive, we didn’t know anything about the world and we tended to believe whatever we were told. It is that child-like innocence that we sometimes miss. Weren’t the times beautiful when we still believed there was a pot full of gold at the end of the rainbow?

I think that a lot of us secretely yearn back to being like that, but simultaneously damn well know that they can’t afford that. For a very simple reason: People would take advantage of it. The desire to be faithful towards others, to see the light in them will be called naive.

There is some truth to that, being gullible with people who don’t care about you is indeed just stupid. That’s why over time people tend to be more cautious, because they are more aware of the tricks people have up their sleeve. Though I wonder can’t we sometimes let our guard down? Can’t we let go of the reins?

We can, we just need to know when. When going on a hike in the mountains, why then not enjoy the mountains like a child? If you are in company with your loved ones shouldn’t you then be able to enjoy life to the fullest?

We need to participate in more acts where it is allowed to lose, where the stakes aren’t too high. We need more play. Playing a game of soccer with your friends, going on a walk with your partner, all those activities where the main objective is to have fun. To have fun like a child would do.

Not only does this broaden your sense of what life can be, it also detaches you from your professional identity.

You don’t have to act anymore as the serious all-knowing man, you can let yourself go and be naive. For a few moments you can be free, free from all protective mechanisms and just enjoy the thing those mechanisms try to protect.

And when you arrive at work the next day you notice that you can move more freely, that you can work on that difficult problem you’ve been trying to solve from a completely different angle.

As a society we’ve become so obsessed with optimization and productivity, that we forgot what we are actually doing and why we are doing it. The algorithmic age has us moving like computers ourselves. Trying to solve life like it is an algorithm that should be optimized.

This computational way of living destroys our own raw unique way of living, leading us to forget why we do what we do.

That’s why I think it is more important than ever for us to preserve that raw playful energy. And I’m sure that the best way to do that is to sometimes be naive, to treat the world like a humongous playground and at times even be indistinguishable from a child. Naivety and childishness always contained beauty, they just happen to make us so vulnerable that we’ve become afraid to admit it.