What Did Childhood Teach Us Before Productivity Trained It Out of Us?

How growing up becomes a process of abandoning wonder—and why that loss leaves many adults feeling empty.

Childhood understands something that adulthood works very hard to forget.

Children don’t move through the world with a checklist: they wander, pause, and often fixate on odd details. They follow curiosity without asking whether it’ll be useful later. Time stretches for them not because they’re inefficient, but because they’re present.

Our modern productivity culture, driven by the demands of our economic overlords and media, teaches us to see this as waste.

Very early, we begin training children out of their natural rhythms. We reward sitting still over moving, answers over questions, and speed over exploration. We praise them for finishing quickly and gently shame them for drifting off. Daydreaming becomes a problem to solve or medicate into non-existence as wandering attention becomes something to correct.

By adulthood, most of us have internalized this terrible lesson. We measure our days by our outputs. We evaluate our worth by what we’ve completed, not by what we’ve noticed or experienced. We feel vaguely guilty when we’re not producing something that can be pointed to, counted, or justified.

In the process, something essential gets eroded.

Children approach the world as a place to be explored, not conquered. They touch things, dismantle things, ask questions that don’t lead anywhere obvious. They aren’t interested in optimization. They are, instead, interested in understanding. When they repeat an action again and again, it’s rarely because they’re trying to perfect it. It’s because repetition itself is teaching them something they can’t yet name.

This mode of engagement builds a different kind of intelligence. It cultivates intuition, pattern recognition, emotional attunement, and a sense of connection that doesn’t depend on achievement. It allows meaning to emerge rather than be extracted.

Productivity, by contrast, is goal-driven. It asks what something is for before it asks what it is. It prioritizes efficiency over intimacy. It encourages us to skim rather than sink in, to move on quickly once a task is complete.

This has its place, of course. Societies need people who can build, maintain, and execute. But when productivity becomes the dominant lens through which all activity is judged, it begins to hollow people out.

Reading becomes skimming for takeaways. Conversation becomes networking. Rest becomes recovery in service of future work. Even leisure is evaluated by whether it made us more effective afterward.

Children don’t live this way, at least not until after they’re acculturated. They play without outcome. They tell stories that go nowhere. They stop mid-sentence because a cloud caught their attention. They understand, intuitively, that being alive isn’t a problem to be solved.

As adults, we often dismiss this as immaturity. But what if it isn’t something to outgrow, but something to integrate?

Many of the qualities we later call wisdom are extensions of childhood capacities that were never fully extinguished: The ability to sit with uncertainty. The willingness to explore without guarantee. The patience to stay with a question longer than is comfortable. The capacity to be moved by small things.

When these qualities are lost, adulthood becomes brittle. People grow efficient but shallow, busy but disconnected. They don’t lack intelligence, they lack spaciousness and depth.

This is why so many adults feel a vague grief they can’t explain. They sense that something essential has been traded away, but they can’t remember when the exchange happened. They just know that life feels narrower than it once did, even as it’s grown more crowded.

Reclaiming what childhood teaches doesn’t mean abandoning responsibility or pretending the world has no demands. It means, instead, loosening the grip of constant optimization. It means allowing parts of life to be unproductive on purpose.

This might show up as walking without tracking steps, reading without highlighting, or sitting outside without a podcast. Letting a thought wander without dragging it back to “usefulness.” Giving attention to something simply because it’s interesting, not because it advances some goal.

At first, this can feel uncomfortable. The productivity reflex kicks in and the urge to justify arises. But over time, another rhythm returns.

You begin to notice more. You feel less fragmented. Questions become richer. Creativity feels less forced. Life regains the texture when we were young.

Children remind us that meaning isn’t always something we manufacture. Often it’s something we allow. It shows up when we stop trying to extract value from every moment and start inhabiting, living within those moments instead.

The tragedy isn’t that we grow up; it’s that we forget what growing was like.

Wisdom doesn’t require us to become children again. Instead, it asks us to remember what we knew before we were taught to forget.

And to let that remembering quietly reshape the way we live.