People are weird

I had an odd thought earlier today. The title is a polite version of it, because it was actually more like people are retarded. I'm not certain how much this applies to everyone in the world, but I'd suspect it counts for a significant chunk. After all, the only prerequisite is a tendency for your imagination to have run wild when you were a kid.
That is, in fact, the key component. What happened to those worlds - the tiny but brilliant ones that were constructed inside our heads? The yearning to somehow be apart of worlds that were so much richer than ours, so much more full of adventure, so filled with life itself. Or so they seemed anyways.

The simple response would be that we grew up and in doing so saw that the real world could never have such things; but is that really the case? Yes, yes, I'm sure the first part happened, but what are the real limitations of this world? How is it that we came to live in this seemingly drab and boring land if countless multitudes of people are filled with dreams, hopes, and desperate wants to find adventure and discover the unknown - continuously! It's not just our generation or something, this has been going on for as long as we could record our thoughts. The stories came before history was ever kept after all. We even, in our wisdom, remade large parts of our history into more fanciful versions as if to appease that inner hope and ignite it in those who would come after us.

It seems like those wild thoughts get contained as we get older. They're carefully wrapped up under endless excuses for why they can't happen just then, right up until they're distant enough that they can be stored away forever in nostalgia. Left as tiny happy glimmers in our memory of a time when we thought we could do so much more. Really, that's all that remains by then, isn't it? We recall our younger dreams and we're always just a bit sad because they never came true, that nothing we so eagerly waited for ever happened.

It's easy to explain why this happens to everyone - the slow assertion of what we'll call 'reality', but how reality came to be the way it is leaves more questions. If we've all - and I suspect, or at least hope we've all had dreams - why did we ever grow up and make the world the way it is? Why haven't we ever tried to change it? When we think about the world all that comes to mind are hard cynical thoughts about coming wars and old grudges that will never die, horrible tragedies that scar entire cultures and wipe out others. We make concessions for what we wanted and resign ourselves to whatever is handed out to us. How did we come to make this, given what we all started as when we were young?

It's an odd day for thoughts, I guess. Melodramatic grumblings and whatnot. It came about when some of my family were talking about how good it was that a friend had - apparently against all odds - found work doing what she had always hoped to do.

Also yes, I know this can be taken as overly optimistic thoughts about the innocence of youth, but I can't for the life of me remember ever reaching a certain age and suddenly deciding I wasn't going to go in for that happiness shit anymore. I can't imagine anyone else did either. So why is it considered a rare and great thing to still be striving to achieve your dreams - shouldn't we all be doing that every day? There's nothing stopped us but ourselves.