I didn't have an imaginary friend growing up.
I also didn't have any real friends, but that is a different conversation.
Talking with a client today about imagination development and problem-solving ability (inspired by what I was writing about yesterday), he was saying how he had an imaginary friend growing up. And estimates are that until relatively recently, around 50% of kids had imaginary friends when young. But this has dropped off significantly as instead of having imaginations, screens have captured the imagination.
I think that the drop in imaginary friends is another indicator to the reduction in skillset and depth. Humans are creative animals that are able to predict the future through complex modelling systems, as well as imagine what doesn't exist. And an imaginary friend is a way to explore the world, navigate complexity and process experience. They give a child a sounding board to practice upon and test ideas, as well as problem-solve for solution to challenges.
But having an imaginary friend takes effort and mental space, because it has to be created and interacted with. Which is why so few children have imaginary friends now, because their lives are either so structured and filled with schedules and activities, or for most, filled with a constant stream of compelling content that distracts them from thinking.
My daughter doesn't have an imaginary friend.
She has imaginary worlds.
The main one is "Mouseland", which is a place filled with magic and lore, and a growing history and culture, including celebration events. There are other lands too, similarly named, and my daughter (who has considered herself a mouse for about six years now), can visit with her own magic skills. The other lands are not as fleshed-out as Mouseland, but they each have their own type of magic and habits.
On top of this, she has her soft toys, with most of them having their own name, and many of them having a personalities and behaviours and beliefs that are unique to them. I am often quite surprised at not only how complex some of these personalities can be, but also how she can keep them consistent over long periods of time. They are more than play things, they are characters in her experiential world.
Talking to her yesterday while she was cleaning her room, she told me that instead of disliking the cleaning, she has decided that each thing she has to put away is living, and she has a conversation with it to get it to go home to its right place. Some of the items are willing, some not willing, and some are funny and silly, and mess around. While unnecessary, her room was cleaned far faster than if she did what she normally does, and gets distracted by anything else.
What I think is interesting with this kind of child's play, is it provides a huge amount of learning and practice opportunities to not only face problems, but also in how to overcome them by essentially giving advice to oneself. When her toy bunny has a problem, she thinks through the situation and comes up with a solution. It allows her the chance to test her personal theories, as well as get experience as an interested third-party observer, friend, and confidante.
Again, like I was saying about reading, this kind of activity supports the development of a huge cluster of skill areas across the mental and emotional sectors, as well as tying them to physical reality. When children play like this, they are part of the experience as both a participant, and a guiding force, a victim, and an agent of change. The emotional development associated with this kind of play may be vital for building the skills necessary for navigating real-world relationships with other humans. But because we are flooding our systems and hijacking our attention with largely useless consumer content, we are limiting our exposure to and the skills needed to build quality relationships.
For many years I have believed (and I think my beliefs are now vindicated), that overconsumption leads to a lack of imagination. As I have said for a long time already, the more we consume, the less we create, and I believe this is having a fundamental impact on children, where the majority from a young age are consuming far more at a far higher rate, but are degrading in skillset. Intelligence isn't about how much one can recall from what one consumes, it is about what is able to be done with what is known.
Quoting Shakespeare, doesn't make you Shakespeare.
Practice makes perfect.
Well, as Vince Lombardi correctly corrected, perfect practice makes perfect. But regardless, repetition is the key to skill development. And, repetition is also the key to building habits, good and bad. There might not be such a thing as perfect practice for children or anyone, but practicing the human skills we need is vital to be able to face and overcome the challenges we are going to face. Consuming a lot of content doesn't practice to develop much skill, but it is a repetitive process that embeds the habit of low-value consumption.
My client today was telling a story about how he and his cousin as young teens would travel the forty kilometres to the city. And every time, his cousin wanted to go to McDonald's to eat, saying that his dream would be to work there, getting paid in food. Forty years later, his cousin looks like his dream came true. The habits built to value low-quality food in childhood, carried all the way through his life, and he is not happy with the outcome.
Careful what you wish for.
Similarly, imaginary worlds can be a double-edged knife, because while it is possible to use our imagination to build skill so we can, it is equally possible to use our imagination to limit ourselves and create excuses why we can't. I suspect that a lot of the imagination created by over-consumers is more geared toward the "I can't" type, where they are victims of circumstance, as they haven't developed the practical skills of being an agent of change in their environment.
A consumer is always reliant on the feed.
And the quality of the feed matters too. But more importantly perhaps, is the practice with the experience to develop the skills. The speed of content delivery today doesn't give space to the brain to use what is consumed, to make it a lesson. Instead, it is quickly put to the side to be replaced by the next bit of content, and then the next. It is like having a tube down the through, being fed without tasting the meal. And without that taste, what is eaten isn't experienced, isn't savoured, and isn't replicable.
Maybe I need to create an imaginary friend for myself.
If I were to create one, I would want it to be one that helps me be my best, that supports me to push through challenge and overcome, to try without freezing in fear of failure, to push myself toward my outer limits, to learn from my world, and keep practicing to improve myself and the world around me.
A friend indeed.
Taraz
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