By 
Until usually around the age of 9ish, we believe there is a fat dude that guides flying reindeer through the sky at 3,000 times the speed of sound and gives presents to anyone who at least once vaguely believed in Jesus. We believe in real, literal magic in the world.
Then something happens. We either think about it a little bit more than we used to, or the dickface kid who would grow up to constantly blurt out, “Did I mention I’m an atheist?” makes us feel stupid, and we stop believing in Santa Claus.
This dose of reality hurts for a second because believing in magic is fun, but overall, the letdown really isn’t that bad.
Sure some fictional fat asshole is taking credit for our parents’ work and there’s no such thing as real magic, but we still get an iPad, so we get over it pretty quickly.
But it does often become a defining moment of our childhood. We start to understand things in terms of what’s possible and what’s not. There’s a moment of, “Oh this is how the world actually is.” We start to look at a magic trick, and think critically for the first time, and say, “Okay that rabbit didn’t teleport into that hat. That guy did something.” It’s in many ways the beginning of kids not being total idiots.
Ten years later, something similar happens. We get into college, and think we’re going to take over the world. We think we can literally do anything, that we’re going to become massive public figures that change society forever, and that we’ll get at least 4 gold medals for being sexy. We believe in this amazing, shit-kicking future version of ourselves. This magical future self is the Santa of our college years.
Then something happens when we get out of college. It’s one of the most awful things we’ll ever experience: reality hits.
Only instead of by a smarmy atheist kid, our delusions are broken by actual events. We expect to get out of college and just find the job we want. And we don’t–again, and again, and again. We don’t even find the job that could lead to the job. We lose touch with friends we used to cherish. Every Tinder match at some point types “Tits or GTFO” before a potential date is even brought up.
Shit like this happens time and again until we arrive at a similarly defining moment of, “Oh this is how the world actually is. Life just isn’t going to work out for me.” The safest and easiest way to bear this is to quickly accept it, forget about your dreams, and give up on yourself, so that’s exactly what we do.
Which is, you know, worse than the Santa thing. You don’t even get a Lego set out of this whole ordeal.
So the result of this is that we don’t just stop believing in the idea that we can do anything we set our mind to. We stop believing in the idea that we can do anything…like, at all.
At the beginning of your twenties, you’re thinking, “I’m going to kick the world’s ass, have an eight pack, and make a billion dollars,” and by the end of your twenties, you’ve freefallen to, “I really don’t know if I can stop eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. I think that might be a part of me now.
Let’s be clear: we all were wrong when we were seventeen. We did believe in too much. We can’t do anything, and we’re probably not going to take over the world.
But if you’ve had your spirit broken to the point where your attitude is, “This is what my shitty life will always be. It’s too late now to do anything,” then you’re even dumber than the 17-year-old you who once uttered, “I’ll probably have my own show by the time I’m 26 and and my second mansion by the time I’m 28.”
But it’s hard to see that. Once our spirit has had its balls kicked a few times, an ideal future self can feel like magic. A simply better, more successful, happier you can feel like some far off, whimsical idea. It can feel as impossible as a fat dude falling down a chimney and giving you an X-Box made by Nordic little people.
But it’s not. It’s very real. And you know what? So is Santa.
What, you don’t believe me?
Think about the behavior we exhibit every holiday season.
Would you normally spend two hours at a factory farm-esque mall trying to find something you guess your great aunt might like who you talk to once a year?
Would you normally stiff arm grandmothers in the Elmo aisle so that your kid could smile for four seconds on Christmas?
Would an old, unkempt white man normally sit on a throne in the mall and invite children to sit on his lap?
Of course none of that would happen because it’s not really us doing any of that. It’s Santa. Every December, we become possessed by the spirit of Santa, so we do things we wouldn’t normally do. He spins our head around 360 degrees and makes us vomit green Christmas joy at our friends and families.
We believe in the spirit of the holiday enough to let it turn us into maniacs hellbent on creating a magical good time. Enough of us become possessed by this that year after year, that magic seems to happen. Santa is created.
So that leads me to the dumbest sounding thing I’m ever going to write on this site. It will make you cringe upon reading it, and me barf upon writing it, but here it goes.
I think maybe you should become possessed by your ideal future self, and believe in your own magic again.
I know. I’m really sorry we both had to read that.
How to Create Magic (Hint: It’s not Actually Magic)
At one point a long time ago, a magician dreamt up the idea of showing an audience an empty hat, and then pulling a rabbit out of it, and it seemed impossible. It seemed actually magical. But it wasn’t. It was entirely possible to make it happen. It just took a lot of combined effort. It took weeks of brainstorming, years of sleight-of-hand practice, and seemingly endless trial and error to find just the right way to put your pinky up a rabbit’s butt to keep it calm*. The success of the trick was the result of nothing but a lot of a little bit of work.
*Some of this may be made up.
That’s also how Santa reappears every holiday season. Millions of people stampede each other for Red Lobster gift cards, guys with heart conditions put on furry red suits in malls, and every parent in the world bold faced lies to their child for like a decade. He doesn’t exist because we wish really hard, or visualize, and hold a seance. Fuck all of that. We manifest what seems magical and impossible into existence with massive combinations of effort. That’s the key to making everything that seems amazing happen.
Now with you and becoming who you want to be, this is all on a smaller scale. You don’t have to convince a chunk of the population that a magic fat man with flying reindeer exists. You just have to do whatever you want to do–start a business, get promoted, lose weight, or stop making every goddamn conversation about you, Therese!
And it’s good that it requires less total work because unlike with creating Santa, it’s just you doing it. You are solely reliant on you for creating the better you.
But the principle is exactly the same: creating what seems impossible, far off, and magical is really just the result of a massive combined effort–a million baby steps.
If you just do a little bit every day, over time it tends to add up to you improving you who you are, having a better life, and eventually, triumphantly throwing out your Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
So what happens now? Now it’s the time to become Santa–just like you do every December. Become–as well as you can in your average ass body without your flying reindeer–the thing you used to imagine was so God damn real.
As a reminder: in the same way that no one can manage to make reindeer fly from roof to roof, you stil can’t literally do anything. You won’t make it to the NBA. You won’t become an oil tycoon. Ryan Gosling is still totally uninterested in you.
There is no real magic. But you can make what seems magical happen, and that includes a lot. You can still–through a lot of a little bit of effort–go places you currently can’t fathom. You can start a business that isn’t stupid, you can actually listen to people when they talk to you, and you can get into a shape that isn’t “world’s biggest bag of mashed potatoes.” You might even still have room to pursue a dream or two. You can make your life way less stupid.
But first you have to become possessed by the future you. You have to have that improved you in your head, and you have to work every day to become that person a little bit more.
But even before that, you have to believe in yourself. You have to know that you can become better and create a better life. You have to…oh no, here it comes again…
…believe in your own magic.
I don’t remember having that attitude at college. I remember being about the most depressed I’d ever been up until that point on my first day, feeling lost and hopeless, and was only rescued by our dorm’s resident extrovert kicking in all our doors and introducing us to the magic of collectively drowning our sorrows in cheap lager until our inhibition filter crumbled and we all peer bonded over doing stupid shit like riding shopping carts down the steepest hill in town. The course itself was punishing, hard to follow and I sucked at doing the assignments, and daily life outside of it was a matter of scraping by on as little money as possible until next time the parents visited. There was no illusion there of some amazing shit-kicking future version of myself, in fact there was essentially no future planning at all beyond the immediate next few weeks. It was just a struggle to survive day to day through the entire three years until the (ultimately, it was to prove, worthless) certificate was in my hand and I could escape to start using it to build some poorly-defined semblance of a career.
If anything there was more optimism whilst in my senior years of high school, working towards the exams to get into college and checking out the different options, but I was already struggling a bit, and wholly directionless, just basically doing what I was told and not really having any idea of what the future may hold. The 90s were not an optimistic time. The first dotcom bubble burst just as I was starting to look for college places so the IT industry, which I may otherwise have pinned my hopes on, suddenly didn’t look like a sure bet any more (yeah yeah, hindsight and all that), Engineering (which I’m looking at now, and would have absolutely loved) was never even discussed as an option, and in any case a series of hopeless teachers and general academic mismanagement meant that only one out of four forms in my year ever got anything close to the right combinations of shop classes that would be needed to score a place on a college engineering course (the current apprenticeship revival was a good 15 years away), mine not included, and even if it had the general scores were so abysmal (and the rest of us faring even worse on the half-baked classes we did do) that only one guy in my year ended up doing it, in a second-rate establishment right at the other end of the country. So the only option seemed to be the third-choice “hard” (well, Biology) science degree route, which wasn’t massively enthusing because what can you even do with that? Be a GMO lab tech? Monitor the health of Pollock populations in the sub-arctic Atlantic? Wow. The future’s semi-bright, the future’s beige, dull, and pretty uncertain.
So I dunno how far back we’d have to reach to recapture that boundless youthful optimism we’re supposedly meant to have during our college years. Thinking it through, probably into elementary, maybe aroun 9 or 10 years old, and those memories are pretty fuzzy (they ought to be, as it was the early 90s). The closest my cadre got during late teens/early 20s was oblivious nihilism. You can’t despair about the way the rest of your life looks when you’re blackout drunk.
So I’m afraid you kinda lost me somewhere around the third paragraph. I don’t know how to fix this one. The reality of life’s drudgery, how the system is generally fucked, there aren’t actually any superheroes or fairies or Santa Claus, and that our actual leaders are corrupt sons of bitches who can’t be trusted and don’t know what they’re doing kicked in even really before high school, sort of around the time of Desert Storm et al. (And, over here in the UK, the end of the Thatcher years and the period of the Major government; there was a slight lift with Cool Britannia and New Labour, but a lot of us still saw it for the shallow facade it later turned out to be) … I don’t know if I have the ability to go back to being 9 years old. I don’t remember enough of my life or feelings from around then. And it was maybe just because I was sufficiently sheltered and not sufficiently cognizant of reality to know any better. Not even really looking towards a rosy future, because I didn’t yet have the mental equipment to even really consider the future as any kind of abstract concept, beyond whether or not we had to go to school tomorrow, and if Christmas/Birthday was coming up any time soon. Certainly not years ahead. I’d only lived nine of them and been properly conscious and forming meaningful long term memories for maybe half that time, the idea didn’t really make any kind of sense then.
So, yeah… what now?
But funnily enough, on the flipside (as I figured I may as well give the next few paragraphs a fighting chance), I have actually got a Lego set out of the ordeal, or something like it. A birthday present from a friend was a lego-esque solar powered robot kit. It’s been a few months and I haven’t yet got round to building it, but I may have a few spare hours on Easter Monday to attack it. So there’s that, at least. Even though it’s little more than meaningless diversion.
(and a couple years before that, an actual-lego, or maybe megabloks, coffee mug, plus the parts to build a dinky missile launcher jeep thing that could stick onto the handle)
(( I guess what I’m saying is… Lego can just be bought, with money. If no-one’s going to give you or someone else a set… buy your own. And buy some for other people you know who you think might like or need one. Hell, I know someone a couple years older than me who recently built an honest to goodness Lego Millennium Falcon, thing was like three feet across. Stuff the cable TV subscription and put the money towards things like that instead. ))