1. Return

There comes a time in a man's life when he begins to question his path.

Am I doing the right thing?

Did I make the right choices?

Does this hobby or this trade define me?

What influences me to make these decisions?

These questions and many more like them can form the core of what people would call a "midlife crisis." A midlife crisis, however, is predicated on the knowledge of my exact time of death, something only the wyrdæ know. Therefore, to have the most accurately timed midlife crisis, I have decided to remain in a state of constant crisis just in case the fates will me to die at any moment.

As I approach 30, the ideas of death and childhood weigh heavily on my mind. As a man who desires a wife and children of my own, the idea of the innocence and magic of childhood is something I crave to see again. I am also always aware of death. Memento mori is one of the most powerful philosophies one can hold, and the good it does for those who correctly understand it has no equal. So, with both death and life on my mind, I naturally have been drawn back to my beginning

If I went to the land of my ancestors today, would the child I was be happy with the man I became?

This question has caused within me a series of existential panic attacks and revelations. That child would be utterly disappointed. There were so many things I said I would do that I never did, and even more things I said I'd never do that I instead did. All throughout my late teens and into my 20s, I was on a perpetual quest to reinvent and rediscover myself and move away from childhood and into something else. This was not without reason, of course. We all are expected to grow up, and for me and my own particularly traumatic childhood, that act of growing up was expedited early on. This then begs the question: what does it mean to "grow up"?

For me, growing up meant running away from life and rejecting the inherent magic of reality. Children understand and believe in magic, and adults spend a long time brainwashing children into giving up this belief. There is magic in all aspects of life, from the mundane hobbies we enjoy to real mystical and spiritual experiences in nature and from the Gods. Adulthood, in its modern, soul-crushing, capitalistic, materialist drudgery, is an effort at the wholesale eradication of magic. Fantasy, roleplay, whimsy, the occult—all are aspects of the inner magics of childhood creeping back in and trying to take ground from this adultness that has so poisoned our minds.

2. Magic and Melancholy

In recent years I have felt an immensely deep melancholy and longing for something, anything that resembles what I felt in my childhood. The colors and emotions in my head paint pictures that sometimes I think only a select few can see. Those who feel these deep pains know what it is I speak of. Melancholy, anemoia, sonder, saudade. All of these silly little words for the same core feeling. A deep romantic longing for a life of fantasy and magic. The understanding that you, right now, are a thinking, feeling being surrounded by other thinking, feeling beings, but many of them, if not the vast majority of them, have lost this spark. It's why this rude term of NPC is so popular, but hilariously so often used by the real NPCs themselves!

This is a totally uneducated guess here. Essentially, I'm just spitballing some bullshit about psychology I don't actually know much about, so consider this vibes-based philosophy here, but I think the fact that these select few feel said emotions so strongly is evidence of some sort of childhood trait retention that shows up at higher levels in some people. For those who refuse the 9–5, who refuse to be a cog in some machine and instead daydream and plan and wonder about reality, the INTPs and Aquariuses of the world who think so fucking hard all the time.

It's about not giving up those imaginary friends and worlds you dreamed up in childhood. It's feeling, as an adult, a longing to return to those worlds. People say things were more colorful as children, but for me it's not just color and brightness. I think it's dimensional. I think we were actually physically in a different dimension and some shift took place. Maybe it happens at a certain age for everyone, maybe it happened just once, but we shifted, and for those select few who resonate with this, what you really are feeling is a sense of unease because you are in the wrong universe. This is not your timeline; this is not your reality. Our world had magic in it, and this one has little or none. The rest of society, those NPCs, the vapid, materialist, emotionless dregs who call themselves human. They don't see it. They can't feel what we feel. They have never collapsed under the weight of painful nostalgia like you or I have. When you tell them memories physically hurt you, they look at you with confusion. They were not born this way; they were crushed by the machine and have lived in the cage for so long they can't even see life outside of it.
And maybe, maybe in some way this is the genesis of all these mental health issues. Instead of strictly chemical issues with the mind, we are under spiritual assault: a soul sickness, a plague of the machine sent to snuff out this conscious resistance to reality.

Many feel the weight of this so much they take their own lives. The universal shift kills them mentally, and they just take the final step. Instead of becoming the Sisyphus of Albert Camus, who recognizes the absurdity of his condition and pushes onward in defiance of it, they let the rock crush them, on purpose, maybe in hopes of returning to that other world. They see this as the only way out.
But we do have another way out. Sure, we might be stuck here, but for you, the creative soul, the magical soul, the person who can say fuck you and fuck this universe, you have the ability to recreate that other dimension here. That's what we are meant to do; we are meant to bring magic back into this world.
Return is not possible in this physical sense; never let your melancholy become so painful that you seek a way out that you cannot return from. Instead, we are here to REBUILD, not to die. We need to spiritually return, mentally return.

Do not think, "Reality is wrong; I must go back." Instead, you must say, "Reality is wrong; I'll make it right again."

The soul sickness that plagues the minds of these lost souls who fall off the precipice of no return is a vile thing, and their loss is a deep pain we all have felt. Do not let yourself become one of these people.
Go up and over the walls that cage you, but remember: you must remain in this reality, if only physically. The temporal and spiritual self can return to that childhood magic. If you do this, nobody can tear down your castle.

Build the pillow fort of the adult real.
Play knights and dragons.
The dragons have now become the people and places and things that tell you to give up your quest. They are the marauders at the gates of your new castle. STRIKE THEM DOWN.

3. What is there to do

A coworker of mine is in his 50s, has worked all his life, and has all this money but nothing to do with it. He once said to me, "When I was a kid, I dreamed of being a space cowboy."

I wanted to ask him, what is stopping him? He has seven figures and an empty nest... but I knew there would just be excuse after excuse as to why he can't do what he wanted to do.

This is the ultimate victory of the machine. So what can we do to stop this?

To apply this practically and to begin my transformation and return, I have delved deeply into what it is I felt as a child and what I wished to become. I have begun rediscovering the mundane little hobbies I had as a kid. The little things like photography, tennis, playing the cello, going on hikes, riding a bicycle.

In my 20s, my hobby was getting new hobbies, and sure, some of them I still enjoy today, but the majority have been abandoned in an ever-growing quest for novelty. Now what is old is what is new, and what was new has become nothing more than a ten-year waste of time. I have begun the process of return.

I've been using old technology, playing old games, and developing skills I put on pause for 15 years. This is not retreat but a reformat. We live in today, not yesterday, and so my childhood hobbies are turning into adult skills. Places to go to connect and form bonds, skills that train the mind and grow the purse. Hobbies that can lessen the burdens of modernity, not replace them.

What did you used to do? Find that thing, and do it again.

4. The Ancestral Principle

Our memories and our childhoods are wonderful places to rediscover old joys and bring them into modernity, but we don't have to just look at our own lives. Personal memory is only one layer of inheritance. When your own remembered past runs out, there is an older inherited past behind it.

We have a thousand thousand ancestors who also had childhoods, magic, and lives we can draw upon. For myself, this is changing careers to follow what my father and his father did. For some, this is a reconnection to a more ancestral and folkish religious identity, or a cultural and historical appreciation for your people. A move away from the universal and cosmopolitan and towards what makes you unique, what made your ancestors unique. The things you have shared through blood memory and the struggles of your people. Maybe, due to material conditions, your childhood was devoid of the opportunity to even pursue hobbies or skills.

The system we live in has deprived many children across the world of a sense of joy and wonder, so perhaps you must look to the joys your ancestors instead felt. Revive their passions and bring a part of them back to life. In my faith, we are the reborn aspects of long-dead ancestors, so in a way, by reliving their lives, we are reincarnating them. Maybe something like that can be done by you as well, even if you don't accept the religious framing. Give them honor and respect, and look to them for answers on how you should live and what you should do. Go as far back as you'd like.

You are thrown into the world, descended from particular ancestors at a particular time and place, given your mother tongue, moral intuitions, customs, and genetics. Your heritage is fundamentally what makes you you, and it is entirely unchosen.

So use this to your advantage and embrace the stories of your people and the magic they once believed in. Bring their magic back into the world, and in doing so, bring your own back with it.

Don't let their stars die out.

5. In Closing

Both you and those who came before you have countless passions, dreams, and magical experiences you can recreate right here and right now. Don't allow yourself to be consumed by the machine. Instead, revive both your inner child and the countless souls of those who came before you.

Return to the things that once filled you with wonder. Rediscover the dreams you abandoned, revive the passions your ancestors carried, and rebuild the magic that adulthood and modernity tried to strip away from you.

You cannot go back. You cannot return to another time, another childhood, or another world. But you can take what was beautiful in those worlds and build it again here.