As a senior about to graduate in June, it suddenly hit me the other day that things will never be the same again. I was playing Minecraft on a boring Saturday evening, and I began feeling immense stress as I tried to pick a design for my house. I wanted to make it a perfect survival base because I was always a terrible builder, and I wanted to build a house that I could be proud of. When I was done with my house, I still felt like something was missing, and I spent the next four hours mining for blocks and upgrading my tools to build what I had in mind. At the end of it, I felt very tired, and I had never felt this way about Minecraft when I was a kid.

This also applies to other games, but I was never such a perfectionist about a game. Isn’t Minecraft supposed to be a peaceful escape? I used to feel so free when I was playing games as a kid because my mind was so much simpler, and I only cared about having fun. If I didn’t have the perfect plan for building a house, so what? Little me would have just moved on to building something else and get back to it later. Games were only for pure enjoyment as a kid, but as you grow older and get entangled with stressful responsibilities such as college applications and jobs, you start to lose this sense of wonder you had as a kid. You tend to start viewing games as more competitive, and you try to assign purpose to games created only for pure enjoyment. When I asked Kaitlyn Hwang (11), a long-time gamer, about this topic, she expressed, “As a kid, I saw games without competition and a big playground where the possibilities felt endless. However, as I got older, games became too competitive, and I felt like the game’s goal was not just to have fun but to be the best. This alienated me from some games such as Fortnite or Valorant.” I realized I had been applying this sense of perfectionism and competitiveness about my future to these games. This epiphany made me feel a weird kind of sadness that I had never felt before.

So… how can you regain your inner child? Well, there isn’t a direct answer to this question. All I can tell you is that after this epiphany with Minecraft, I started getting back into what I used to like as a kid to recreate that sense of escape. I think the most important lesson I learned amidst all of the stress I am currently facing is that it is beneficial to set a certain time to do an activity that escapes the creative world. This doesn’t include scrolling on TikTok for hours. I’m talking about things like drawing, crafting, or playing board games, which can immerse you in a creative mode for a long time. This can boost your mood when you get back to your important work. The piles of schoolwork and responsibilities have taken the creativity out of life, and most of us live in this boring mode of work and rest and eat, which can be very tiresome, so it is important to boost up your brain again and relive the experience of being a child.

Even though growing older comes with more responsibilities, it is important to remember to be a kid again. I think we can learn a lot from the innocent children we used to be, and we can hopefully recreate that childish wonder we used to feel when building castles and blowing up mountains in Minecraft.