The Daydreamers Were Never the Problem

Sometimes I wonder if the world has forgotten how to play. The other day I was thinking about childhood and those long afternoons that seemed to stretch forever. I realised how much of that world has disappeared. When I was young, boredom wasn’t an emergency. It was the beginning of something.

If there was nothing to do, we found something. We wandered outside until the streetlights came on. We built cubbies from fallen branches, lay in the grass watching clouds drift overhead, built a spaceship from an old car seat (yeah I did that), and came home with dirty feet and grass stains on our knees.

Entire afternoons vanished without a single photo being taken. Nobody was documenting their lives. Nobody was building a personal brand. Nobody was optimising their free time. We were simply existing.

And somehow, in all that apparent uselessness, something important was happening. We were learning how to imagine.

Looking back, I think we’ve started asking the wrong question.

The question should be: “Does this make you feel alive?”

But it’s usually: “What does this achieve?”

Photograph by Nikky May.

Somewhere along the way, society stopped valuing imagination. We built a world designed for efficiency. A world of schedules, deadlines, performance reviews, productivity systems, and endless measurement. Some days I catch myself scrolling through other people's thoughts before I've even had a chance to hear my own.

Creativity and imagination don’t produce immediate measurable outcomes, and we are taught to push them to the edges of our lives. We stop drawing because it isn’t useful. We stop daydreaming because it isn’t productive, and we stop exploring because there is work to do.

Then one day we look around and wonder why we feel flat and why we feel disconnected. Everything must have a purpose. Everything must justify its existence. Even our hobbies are expected to become businesses.

A person paints and someone asks if they’re selling their work. A person writes and someone asks when they’re publishing a book. A person starts a garden and someone asks how much money it saves. It’s as though simply enjoying something is no longer enough.

The modern industrial world wasn’t built around creativity. It was built around output.

Schools teach children to sit still for hours, follow instructions and produce standardised results. The children who “colour outside the lines” are often told to focus. The dreamers are told to be realistic. The curious are redirected back to the curriculum.

Then those children become adults and enter workplaces that reward compliance in much the same way. Be on time, follow the system, meet your targets, stay busy, and, importantly, keep producing.

What? It’s pointless.

Your value is measured by what you produce. Not by what you imagine. And yet every meaningful advancement in human history began as imagination. Every invention and scientific breakthrough. Every piece of art, and movement that changed society. All of it began with somebody staring into space and asking a question no one else had thought to ask. The irony is hilarious.

The very thing our systems tend to suppress is the thing that built civilisation in the first place.

We are constantly stimulated but rarely inspired. Connected to everyone and somehow disconnected from ourselves. We have become efficient at almost everything except being human. Maybe that's why so many people feel exhausted in a way that sleep never seems to fix.

Photograph by Nikky May.

As someone who writes, I notice this battle constantly. There is always a voice asking what the article will achieve or how many people will read it. But the articles I treasure most were never written for those reasons. They were written because I was curious, and something inside me wanted to explore an idea.

That impulse is difficult to explain, but I suspect it is the same impulse that causes children to build forts from couch cushions or spend hours inventing imaginary worlds. It isn’t productivity, it’s play.

Play may be one of the most misunderstood forces in human life.

We tend to think play is what happens before adulthood. Something we eventually outgrow. But what if play isn’t the opposite of maturity? What if it’s the foundation of creativity?

I wonder whether many people who feel play is immature are simply starved of creativity, of meaning and wonder. They don’t have the room for their imagination to breathe.

Our culture tends to treat creativity as something extra. A luxury or a bonus feature reserved for artists and musicians. But creativity isn’t just about making art, it’s how we solve problems and create the future.

Maybe that’s why so many of us feel lost. We’re trying to survive in a world that constantly asks us to produce while neglecting the very thing that makes life feel worth living.

I’m not saying the answer is to reject responsibility. But maybe maturity isn’t the absence of play. Could it be that real maturity is protecting play, imagination and joy?

Protecting the parts of yourself that the world is trying to convince you are childish.

Because when I look back on my own life, the moments that matter most aren’t the productive ones. Growing older was never supposed to mean becoming less playful. It was supposed to mean becoming brave enough to keep playing anyway.

What if the adults who still daydream, still wonder, still create, still build imaginary worlds, still write stories, still get excited about ideas aren’t immature at all? What if they’re simply protecting something that the rest of the world forgot was valuable?

The older I get, the less interested I am in becoming efficient. I don’t want a life that looks impressive on a spreadsheet. I want a life that feels alive, with room for curiosity.

Maybe the daydreamers were never the problem. Maybe they were the ones remembering something essential. Something the industrialised world convinced us to forget.

Human beings were born to do more than produce. We were born to imagine.

That child lying on the grass watching clouds drift across the sky understood something that many adults have forgotten.

Not everything valuable needs to be useful.

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