I don't think people miss being a child, they miss feeling mentally free

I'm not someone who had a great childhood tbh, I'm aware of that and i know that so well yet i still tear up every time i get nostalgic. Like when i see instagram posts about stuff from shared childhoods (ex: scented erasers, sound of the mourning doves, 2010s internet, etc.) it genuinely makes me say "I wish i was a kid again" because everything felt so new and so fullfilling to me.

I thought about these thoughts a bit more and i realized that i might be romanticizing everything about past too much, and i feel like a lot of people around my age are actually doing the same without realizing it. 

We constantly talk, show and create things about specific things like the examples i talked about when it comes to the past even though objectively stuff mourning doves are still just doves, and if we all discovered something like scented erasers today, i don't think many of us would have the same reaction to it as we did in our childhoods, i would honestly be like "oh cool" and forget about it the next day.

Humans are wired to attaching feelings to certain things we discover at young ages because the world feels new to us. Which is the point; the world feels new to us. As kids, we realistically didn't knew much either. We only knew about what we learned. The more we learned, the more we grew. The more we grew, the more we realized. The more we realized, the more expectations, problems and responsibilities we had. Which meant, less space in our minds.

I don't think the past was as beautiful as we think now, it was the same as today but we never saw that due to our nature. Maybe the past isn't becoming more beautiful. Maybe the present is becoming more complicated.

I dunno. Those are just my thoughts and my experience. Maybe i'm just being corny but i felt like i would post about this because why not!! I like talking about stuff like this sooo much.