On remaining interesting

There are certain conversations that only happen when you're young. I don't necessarily mean when you're a teenager. I mean that period of life where an entire afternoon can disappear because someone asked a question nobody knew the answer to. What exactly makes someone an adult? Would you rather travel through space or through time? What happens after we die? Is talent something you're born with or something you build?

Somehow those conversations felt urgent then. Not because they would change anything, but because they made the world feel bigger. We would spend hours talking about music, books, films, politics, people we admired or people we couldn't stand. We read interviews with musicians as if they contained the secret to life. We bought albums because of one song and ended up discovering entire worlds hidden inside them. Sometimes we became obsessed with a writer or a band for months, almost as if that obsession itself was a way of understanding who we were becoming.

I don't know exactly when those conversations begin to disappear. I suspect nobody notices the moment it happens. One day you're debating whether God exists, and a few years later you're trying to remember whether you already bought toilet paper. It sounds like a joke, but I don't think it is. Adulthood has an extraordinary ability to become operational.

The days slowly fill with things that need to be done. None of them are particularly memorable on their own, but together they occupy an astonishing amount of mental space. Emails. Deadlines. Grocery lists. Bills. Appointments. Tax forms. Passwords. Paperwork. The quiet maintenance required to keep an ordinary life functioning.

When we moved to Croatia, for example, there was very little room for anything else. Residence permits were followed by citizenship. Citizenship was followed by identity cards and passports. Then came opening a business, opening the barbershop, understanding how things worked in a country that was becoming home but still felt unfamiliar. Every step mattered because every step brought us closer to the life we wanted. Looking back, I wouldn't change any of it.

But I also understand why, during those years, my world became smaller. Not emotionally. Mentally. There wasn't much space left for wandering.

I stopped reading as much, not because I loved books any less but because reading requires a kind of attention that scrolling doesn't. It's much easier to watch short videos after a long day than it is to sit with a novel that asks something of you. The same thing happened with music. Instead of listening to albums, I started listening to whatever happened to come next. Curiosity quietly gave way to convenience.

I don't think this happens because we become less interesting. I think it happens because adulthood asks us, every single day, to become more efficient. Efficiency is useful. It is also a terrible substitute for curiosity.

Lately I've been thinking about this because I have become completely absorbed by Star Wars. Not in the casual way people watch a series because everyone else is watching it. I mean in the slightly ridiculous way adults occasionally allow themselves to become fascinated by something. We watched the films one after another, then The Mandalorian, then The Book of Boba Fett. We started building a Darth Vader LEGO. We discuss theories over breakfast. We imitate Tusken Raiders. When we go snorkeling, one of us inevitably starts making Darth Vader's breathing sound underwater. It makes absolutely no sense. That's probably why I enjoy it so much.

Somewhere along the way I realised it wasn't really about Star Wars. It was about remembering what fascination feels like. Children understand this instinctively. Lana can spend ten minutes watching a line of ants crossing the pavement as if she's witnessing something extraordinary. She picks flowers for no reason other than she likes them. She asks questions whose only purpose is to satisfy her own curiosity. Watching her, I'm reminded that imagination isn't something children possess and adults lose. It's something adults stop protecting.

Perhaps that's why I no longer think of reading, writing, museums or music as cultural consumption. The expression has always sounded strangely transactional to me, as if books and films existed to improve us somehow. As if the purpose of reading McLuhan or listening to The Strokes were simply to become more creative, more informed or better at our jobs. Maybe they do all those things. But that's no longer why they matter to me.

They matter because they remind me who I am when nobody is asking anything from me. The books I choose. The music I can't stop listening to. The ideas I disappear into for weeks. The strange rabbit holes that begin with one question and end somewhere completely unexpected. None of those things appear on my résumé, yet they probably explain me better than most professional achievements ever could.

For years I thought protecting those parts of myself was a luxury, something to return to once work became less demanding. I'm beginning to suspect the opposite is true. Perhaps they're the very things that make demanding periods bearable. Not because they make us more productive, but because they remind us that we are more than the sum of our responsibilities.

Every now and then, I think it's worth asking a question we almost never ask adults. Not what they do. Not where they work. Not how busy they are. But what they're obsessed with these days. The answer might reveal something they had almost forgotten about themselves.