I Found the Answer to the Stress of Modern Life

By Sonal Nain

Newsletter Reporter/Producer

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It is 2 p.m. on a still Indian summer afternoon, and I'm 10 years old. I have done half my homework at school. I eat a bowl of pomegranate while my mother prepares lunch. I doodle on my whiteboard, flip through a storybook lying on the table and sip on the Indian soft drink Rasna. I suppose I never quite grew out of it. This, though I did not know it at the time, is what people now label 'whimsy.'

I’m 29 now, and the contrast is hard to miss. My work keeps me in front of a screen for much of the day. If I want food, I can have it delivered in minutes. If I want to talk to someone, I don’t have to leave my room. If I want entertainment, I don’t even have to choose it. An algorithm will offer me something before I’ve had time to wonder what I actually want.

Whimsy seems to be having a moment now. People are finding little ways to be whimsical by taking up crafts, going to pottery classes, picking up analogue hobbies, or bedazzling their plastic sippers and deciding that counts.

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Part of the appeal seems to be that nobody can quite agree on what whimsy actually is. The dictionary calls it "fanciful" or "excessively playful."

Dr. Connie McReynolds, a psychologist and researcher, tells me that "somewhere between being a child and adult, we start to think that every single thing we do has to have a purpose." Whimsy, she adds, offers “a permission slip to let go of expectations and embrace the joy of curiosity, imagination and spontaneity."

I find this funny because I don't remember needing a word for it when I was a child. The TV plays somewhere in the background, but I am barely paying attention to it.

I didn't have a sophisticated theory of childhood then. There was a freedom in not yet believing that every empty patch of time had to be put to some use.

Dr. Matthew Leahy, a licensed clinical psychologist who works with children, adolescents and adults, says that "as the stresses of adulthood accumulate, we tend to focus more on responsibility and problem-solving." But he doesn't see those things as incompatible with playfulness.

You can be playful and responsible at the same time, he says. It might mean doing something spontaneous on a Sunday afternoon, revisiting an old hobby or simply enjoying an activity that leads to no particular accomplishment.

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For Leahy, even reading fiction unrelated to his work in psychology offers a way to step outside his usual professional concerns. Play, he says, gives the brain a break.

When I was child, if there was nothing to do, I would conjure something. I’d assemble my friends and invent games to play. We’d ride our bicycles, take turns on the swings, and run around the house and garden, turning the whole place into our playground. In between, I would eat another bowl of pomegranate.

I would try something, lose interest, move on to something else and somehow still have time for everything. Perhaps that is part of what has become harder to find.

Adult life seems to leave very little room for doing things just because we feel like it. Even our hobbies have become things to document and measure, from logging films on Letterboxd to tracking our runs or taking aesthetic photos of our meals.

Catherine Thomas, managing director of Art Acumen, whose work explores creativity, cultural participation and workplace experience, sees a similar tension in professional life. "We talk constantly about wanting people to be creative, curious and adaptable, yet we often design working cultures around efficiency and measurable outcomes," she said.

Those two impulses don’t always sit comfortably together. Whimsy, she argues, offers a way out of that mindset. It allows us to experiment and make unexpected connections or experience something simply because it delights or intrigues us.

In Inside Out 2, Pixar's Anxiety is so busy preparing Riley for everything that could go wrong that she struggles to enjoy what's happening in the present. It's hard not to recognize a bit of ourselves in that.

Katherine Hosie, an executive leadership coach who works with senior leaders under sustained pressure, describes a similar pattern through a metaphor from Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception. Huxley described the brain as a "reducing valve," filtering out much of what we perceive so we can focus on what is useful. Hosie argues that the demands of adulthood can tighten that filter further.

Stress narrows our attention, Hosie says, directing us toward the immediate task or threat. When that pressure becomes a constant feature of life, the things that don't serve an obvious purpose are often the first to go.

"Whimsy isn’t frivolous. It’s what happens when the valve opens a little, when we see more options, and recover our own perspective," she adds.

The digital world doesn’t require much imagination from me. It requires attention. And I have an endless supply of things competing for it. And somehow, I feel stuck, so I’ve started trying to recalibrate. My most reliable method is also probably my most toxic one. Instead of social media, I read. I painted the other day, too. I’m bad at it. But that’s not really the point.

There is this constant pressure to experience something, to make sure I’m not wasting my time or, worse, not using my full potential. I’ve been sentenced to a lifetime of having fun. I miss not knowing I was doing any of it.

Maybe whimsy doesn’t come back because you schedule enough of it into your life. For McReynolds, whimsy need not involve a dramatic change of routine. It can be as simple as “dancing around the kitchen, putting on your favorite song and singing loudly” or calling an old friend just because it makes you happy. “Not everything in life needs to be useful to be valuable,” she says. “There is so much to be gained from being in the moment and light-hearted.”

There’s a bowl of pomegranate beside me as I type this. I eat one seed, then another, letting the juices flow. It’s not a bad way to spend an afternoon.