Fascination
I feel like, as kids, we were fascinated by almost everything around us. And as we grew older, that fascination slowly disappeared. It makes sense, to some extent. The more familiar something becomes, the less fascinating it feels. When you see something for the first time, there is a certain magic to it. But after seeing it multiple times, it starts to become ordinary.
Think about the first time you saw a bird. Maybe you were two or three years old, and probably you don’t remember it, but I’m sure it was exciting. The same goes for balloons, animals, clouds, trees, cars, trains, everything.
The world was new. Everything was worth looking at.
But then we grew up. Things became familiar. We started going to school, getting jobs, following routines, worrying about money, chasing goals, and getting caught in the rat race. Life started happening, and we stopped paying attention to the things that were always happening around us.
Yet I don’t think our ability to be fascinated disappeared. I think we just started reserving our fascination for things that are new. And that’s probably one of the reasons technology fascinates us so much. Technology is constantly changing. Laptops. smartphones, social media, smart devices, and now AI, all of these things were once completely new to us.
Think about the first time you saw a touchscreen. We went from pressing physical buttons on phones to simply touching a glass screen and watching something happen. It was fascinating. And now we do it hundreds of times a day without thinking about it.
Then came things like Alexa and other smart devices. You could speak to a device in your house and it would respond to you. Again, fascinating.
And now, AI. You type a few sentences into a computer, and it can answer questions, solve equations, write, create images, summarize information, and do things that, not too long ago, would have seemed almost impossible.
It feels like magic. But here’s what I find interesting. We are fascinated by what technology can do, but we rarely stop to understand how it does it. We marvel at AI, but how many of us actually know what’s happening behind the scenes?
We were fascinated by touchscreens, but how many of us stopped to understand how touching a piece of glass can make something happen?
Think about a car. You get in, put your foot on the pedal, and it moves. That’s completely normal to us. But isn’t it incredible? You put gasoline into a machine, and somehow that machine can carry you hundreds of miles. You turn a steering wheel, and the wheels respond. If you really stop to think about everything that has to happen for a car to move, it’s pretty incredible. And yet we don’t think about it. We just drive. We do the same thing with elevators. You step into a small box, press a button, and suddenly you’re several floors higher. How does that work? Most of us don’t know.
Escalators are the same. Buildings. Bridges. Airplanes, trains, plumbing, electricity, the list goes on. We are surrounded by things that would have seemed like magic to humans hundreds of years ago, and we barely notice them.
Maybe we have become less attentive. And this isn’t limited to technology. Think about clouds.
As children, we might have spent hours watching them move across the sky. We might have wondered where they came from, why they moved, why they changed shape, or how they stayed up there.
Now we see clouds and barely look up. But do you know why clouds move? Do you know how they form? Do you know why they sometimes look white and sometimes turn dark?
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I’m sure at some point in our lives, we were fascinated by these questions. Then we stopped asking. And that’s what I think happens as we grow up.
We don’t necessarily stop being curious because we know everything. We stop being curious because we assume we already know enough.
We see an ant walking across the ground and don’t think twice about it. But have you ever really thought about ants? How do they communicate? How do they know where they’re going? Why do they follow particular paths?
At some point, I’m sure you wondered about these things. We all did. We just stopped. And I think this has something to do with why childhood can feel so much happier and more exciting than adulthood. People often say that we were happier as children because we had fewer responsibilities. That’s certainly part of it. But I wonder if another part of it is that we were fascinated by everything.
We didn’t need the next big invention to give us something exciting to look at. The world itself was enough.
A puddle was enough.
A bug was enough.
A cloud was enough.
A bird flying across the sky was enough.
Somewhere along the way, we started needing novelty. We wait for the next big technology, the next big invention, the next big experience to fascinate us. We get excited for a day or two, become accustomed to it, and then start looking for the next thing. But what if we didn’t need to keep looking for something new? What if we simply learned to look more closely at what already exists?
I think we would live much more grateful lives if we stopped occasionally and allowed ourselves to fascinated.
How does an elevator work? Why do clouds move? Why does a tree grow the way it does? How does a bird fly? How does my phone know where I touched it? How does electricity get to my house? How does a tiny seed become a massive tree?
There are endless questions around us. And we know surprisingly little about almost everything.
That’s what I find beautiful about fascination. It doesn’t require the world to become more interesting. It requires us to become more attentive to the world that is already there.
And perhaps that’s also the key to holding on to some of the wonder we had as children. The kind that makes you want to understand how something works, why it exists, and how all the little pieces fit together.
We may have lost some of our fascination with the world, but we can always choose to find it again.
