The Kid Who Didn’t Need a Reason

I can barely remember my childhood.

A few scraps. Mostly blanks. Which is a problem, because lately one question won’t leave me alone: What was I obsessed with as a kid?

Robert Greene has a theory about this. In Mastery, he argues that the things we were drawn to as children are clues. He calls them primal inclinations. They existed for a reason.

That makes sense to me. When a child throws herself into something without any real reason, it’s because her energy naturally flows there. No one assigned it. It just pulls.

Kids can afford that. They haven’t learned efficiency yet.

I have.

Somewhere along the way, I started asking every hour what it’s producing. Every interest has to turn into a skill. Every skill into something useful. Every free afternoon needs a justification.

It looks like discipline. It feels like progress. And it comes with two side effects nobody warns you about.

You’re never in the now. The now is just the waiting room for whatever comes next.

And you never really enjoy anything, because enjoyment doesn’t count as output.

That’s what efficiency does. It turns everything into a means to an end. And when everything is a means, nothing gets to mean anything on its own.

Efficiency kills meaning.

The kid I can’t remember didn’t have that problem. She did things because she wanted to. Fully. Without a business plan.

I’d like to know what those things were. I might never find out.

Something odd happened while writing this, though.

This question has no purpose. It won’t make me better at anything. It doesn’t optimize a single part of my life. I’m drawn to it anyway, for no real reason.

Which sounds a lot like her.

Maybe that’s the clue.