How We Forgot Who We Are: The Loss of Wonder

The average 4-year-old asks up to 900 questions a day. ⁽¹⁾

The most popular of those questions always begin with “why”. One of these questions is the all-famous “Why is the Sky Blue?” Every time, without fail, the adult answer revolves around a half-informed scientific explanation of light scatter in our atmosphere (the phenomenon is Rayleigh Scattering). The answer is reasonably correct; it’s the one we learned in school, but it is also completely beside the point. The 4-year-old wasn’t asking how it worked; they were asking something far older and stranger: why is there a sky at all, and why is it beautiful, and why am I standing here under it?

Somewhere along the way, the adult forgot that this was the real question. In forgetting the question, the adult forgot something much bigger.

The adult forgot what kind of creature he was.

The Strangest Thing About You: Born for Wonder

You are the only kind of being on this planet that asks “why”.

A dog doesn’t philosophize about squirrels. A tree doesn’t wonder why it grew. The mountains aren’t puzzled over their own existence. As far as we can tell, in the entire observable universe, there is exactly one creature that looks at the world and asks what it means.

That creature is you.

This isn’t a small observation—it might be the most important thing about you. Long before language, you were pointing at birds, lights, and faces, wanting to know. You came into this world radically curious, engineered for wonder the way a fish is built to swim.

But somewhere between the childhood backyard and the corporate boardroom, your wondering stopped. We collected definitions, mistaking the names of things for the things themselves. We figured out the mechanisms but forgot to ask about the meaning. In our culture, growing up means going numb. And in losing our wonder, we ultimately lost ourselves.

How We Grew Numb: The Roots of Our Loss of Wonder

Nobody decided to wake up numb. It happened slowly, and for reasons that started with good intentions. A few hundred years ago, some really smart people made a decision that changed the world. They decided to stop asking why things exist and focus only on how they work. It was a brilliant move towards “progress”. You can measure how an apple falls. You can’t measure why an apple exists. By sidelining the bigger questions, science could work on the smaller ones. It worked magnificently. We eradicated disease, harnessed electricity, and put rockets into space. We figured out the technology you are using to read this article.

But the trade-off had a higher cost. Over time, we started to feel that how-questions were the only respectable kind. Asking why sounded childish, sentimental, and soft. The serious adult dealt with mechanisms. Meaning was for the poets and dreamers, a nice-to-have pastime.

We have restrained ourselves in a strange poverty, becoming the most informed generation in human history, yet the least astonished. Though we can explain a sunset down to the photon, we feel nothing as it fades. We map the human genome, yet have no idea why we exist. In the end, we’ve gained a universe of information while losing the universe itself.

One More Trip to Elfland: A Man Who Saw the Loss of Wonder Coming

In the early 1900s, a large, wild-haired, cigar-smoking British journalist named G.K Chesterton noticed our numbness. In one of modern literature’s strangest, funniest, and most piercing works, Chesterton wrote his thoughts in a chapter he titled “The Ethics of Elfland” from his book Orthodoxy. He argued that the nursery taught him truer things about reality than the university did.

“My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales.” ⁽²⁾ 

Fairy tales, he said, get something right that grown-up explanations get wrong. In a fairy tale, when something happens, it is caused by a spell. A spell is something that could, in principle, be broken. There is conditionality to a spell. The pumpkin becomes a coach, but only until midnight. The princess sleeps until the kiss. The world hangs together by a kind of magic.

Why the ‘Laws of Science’ Aren’t Inevitable

This all sounds just like whimsical nonsense until you realize Chesterton is telling the truth about our reality. The “laws of science” that we treat as iron-clad aren’t really laws at all. There’s no logical reason an apple has to fall. We’ve just seen it happen so many times, we’ve given the observation a “serious” name. But the fact that gravity works every time doesn’t mean it has to work. The world is not a cold machine forging inevitabilities. It’s a gift given to us on terms we did not write.

Gratitude: The Only Right Response to a Gift

This is where Chesterton’s argument turns into something our soul recognizes: if nothing in the world had to exist, then everything that does exist is astonishing. A tree is a miracle. Rain is a miracle. The mole on your left cheek is a miracle. The right response to a gift, Chesterton said, is gratitude. Gratitude doesn’t point towards a void; it points towards a person.

The 4-year-old asking “why is there grass?” isn’t wanting a botany lesson. That little brain is asking the deepest question we can ask, and asking it without shame, because the 4-year-old still remembers what kind of creature she is.

J.R.R. Tolkien: Showing Us What We Are For

Chesterton had a younger admirer who took this argument further. His name was J.R.R. Tolkien, and you’ve probably met his hobbits.

In 1938, Tolkien wrote a lecture called “On Fairy-Stories”, and in it, he said something revolutionary: when we make imaginary worlds, we are doing something holy. Far from lying or escaping, we are actively participating in creative reality itself. He had a word for this: sub-creation.

“Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind. Though all the crannies of the world we filled with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build Gods and their houses out of dark and light, and sowed the seed of dragons, ’twas our right (used or misused). The right has not decayed. We make still by the law in which we’re made.” ⁽³⁾

We make because we are made in the image of a Maker. The instinct that drives a child to build a fort, an inkling to invent Middle-earth, or a filmmaker to imagine a galaxy far, far away, isn’t a quirk. That instinct is a fingerprint that points to something true about who we are.

This is why we get lost in fantasy so often. It’s not that we are escaping reality. It’s that, for a moment, we remember what we’re for. We are built to make and to marvel. When we step through the wardrobe into Narnia, when the eagles arrive at the Black Gate, when the impossible, joyous triumph comes at the darkest moment, something in us leaps; that’s the part we’ve forgotten.

Tolkien said fairy tales offer something he called Recovery. We get possessive of things, overconsume things, and we become jaded. We stop seeing the tree in our front yard and the faces at our own table. A good story washes the window. After reading about elves in an enchanted wood, you walk outside and see the tree again in all its wonder. The dragon in the story lets you see the ordinary horse as fantastical.

That’s what fantasy was for. Not a place to live. It’s a pair of glasses.

Why We Are Drowning in Stories but Experiencing a Loss of Wonder

Here’s the strange thing. We are drowning in fantasy. There are endless franchises, sprawling fictional universes, bingeable shows, and doorstop novels. The shelves can barely hold the weight, and the streaming queues are never empty.

Yet, we are not more enchanted. We are more numb.

Why?

We made fantasy the destination and not the lens. Chesterton and Tolkien both knew that fantasy isn’t really in Elfland or Middle-Earth. The magic is in the mundane. Fairy tales are supposed to send you back to the ordinary with new eyes. They make you grateful for an apple, amazed by a sparrow, and astonished by the very threshold of your ordinary life.

Instead, we have used them to escape the ordinary altogether. The wonder never crosses into Tuesday morning. We binge our way through other worlds and return to our own world just as flat as we left it, starving for the next escape. We are tourists of Elfland instead of citizens of a world we should have recognized as Elfland this whole time.

It’s the spiritual equivalent of staring at a menu and never eating the meal.

Escaping Reality vs. Recovering Truth

Underneath the binge lies something sadder. We’re not just trying to escape a flat world. We’re trying to feel like the being we secretly suspect we are. Culture tells us we are accidents. It tells us we are meat that learned to think. It says we are atoms that briefly arranged themselves into a self. We really don’t believe that. We can’t. So we reach for the stories of heroes and quests and destinies, because those stories sound like the truth our bones already know: we are not accidents. We are something. We are Someone.

Our hunger is right. We’ve just been trying to feed it from the wrong shelf.

Remembering Ourselves: Reclaiming a Sense of Wonder

Here is what the Bible has been saying from the first word.

You aren’t a random accident, meat that learned to think, or a temporary collision of atoms in a chaotic universe.

You are made on purpose, by Someone, in His image.

The first chapter of Genesis isn’t trying to compete with a science textbook. It’s answering a question the science textbook can’t touch: what are you? And the answer is staggering. You are the creature God spoke into being and then breathed His own life into. You are the one who bears His image in a world that is itself a gift He made and called good.

Suddenly, every instinct we’ve discussed makes perfect sense. You ask ‘why’ because you were created by Someone with answers. You wonder because you reflect a God who wonders. Your drive to make stories exists because the Maker is Himself the supreme Storyteller, whose narrative echoes through all others. And that deep longing for an enchanted world? It’s because you were made for one—and because, even now, this reality is more magical than you can see.

The World Is a Message, Not a Machine

The Psalmist looks at the heavens and says they are declaring something, not running mechanically, but declaring. (Psalm 19) They are speaking. The trees whisper in the wind. The mountains rumble. This isn’t poetry pretending to be science. This is the truth a child still knows, and an adult has forgotten: the world is not a machine. It is a message. And you are the creature who was made to read it.

Jesus didn’t hand out textbooks. He pointed at lilies and birds, then looked toward the children and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3, ESV)

In that moment, He was restoring the very eyes we’d been talked out of.

The True Story Behind Every Fairy Tale

At the center of the whole story is the moment Tolkien spent his life trying to describe – that sudden, impossible joyous turn at the darkest hour.

The tomb is empty, and death is in retreat.

The fairy tale we’ve been telling each other in a thousand forms turns out to be the shape of reality itself, because the God who made our world also entered it, also died in it, and also rose in it. The story architecture that moves us in every great tale moves us because it is reality.

That is who made you, and that is the world you actually live in.

Walk Back Out Into the Yard: Overcoming the Loss of Wonder

Return to your childhood backyard. You are still there, head tilted back, asking why the sky is blue. The adult, armed with all the right scientific answers, is closer to one kind of truth and a million miles from another.

The science is not wrong. It was just never going to be enough.

You are not a machine that needs better information—you are an image-bearer who needs to remember who you are. Crafted by Someone, and explicitly for Someone, you were built to look up at the sky and feel an awe that no scientific explanation can ever dissolve.

So step back out your door and look at the tree. Really look at it. Notice that it did not have to exist, and neither did you. Let that sink in. Let it crack something open. Ask why it’s there at all. Ask why you are there to ask.

The answer to that question is not a fact.

The answer is a Person.

He has been waiting, all this time, for you to remember.

1. Frazier et al. (2009): Frazier, Brandy N., Susan A. Gelman, and Henry M. Wellman. 2009. “Preschoolers’ Search for Explanatory Information Within Adult–Child Conversation.” Child Development 80 (5): 1592–1611. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01356.x.
2. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy: With Annotations and Guided Reading, annot. Trevin Wax (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2022), chap. 4.
3. J.R.R. Tolkien, “Mythopoeia,” in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Del Rey, 1986), “On Fairy-Stories,” “Fantasy” sec.