On Wonder(and Why Adults Don't Trust It)

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.” Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie

At some point, usually without announcement, wonder stops being encouraged and starts being questioned; it makes us suspicious.

We go from being Peter Pan to wondering why Captain Hook gets so much hate.

We don’t grow skeptical of wonder because it’s childish, but because it asks too much of us. It requires attention, presence, and a tolerance for uncertainty—qualities adulthood trains us to abandon in favor of efficiency, control, and restraint. In a world that rewards optimization, wonder can look like a liability. Wonder asks inconvenient things. It refuses to be useful. And so we learn, quietly, to treat it with caution—as something indulgent, unserious, best left behind.

We’re taught early to associate wonder with childhood, as if it belongs to a developmental phase we’re meant to outgrow. Films like Finding Neverland romanticize this impulse, offering imagination as refuge—beautiful, necessary, and ultimately unsustainable. There’s comfort there, but also a warning: you can visit, but you can’t stay. At some point, you’re expected to return to the world as it is.

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is less forgiving. Wonderland is no longer whimsical; it’s disorienting, unstable, occasionally hostile. Time bends. Scale collapses. Nothing behaves as expected. Alice’s curiosity doesn’t always reward her—it tests her. This version feels closer to adulthood: a world where asking questions doesn’t lead to clarity, only deeper uncertainty.

We (the grown-ups) don’t distrust wonder because it’s naive. We distrust it because it destabilizes the structures we’ve built to survive.

In the film Dead Poets Society, for the adults, wonder has become openly subversive. As a high school student, “Carpe diem” felt like a mantra I could hold on to, but when I’m not careful, it starts to feel like a threat. A reminder that life could be otherwise. And in the film, New England in 1959 was a world that rewarded conformity, productivity, and restraint; that kind of imagination comes at a cost. The film doesn’t end with triumph, but with grief. Wonder doesn’t save everyone. It does, however, leave a mark.

This is what we rarely acknowledge: losing wonder isn’t just a maturity milestone. It’s a loss. One we’re encouraged to dismiss, minimize, or mock. We tell ourselves it was childish. That it had to go. That growing up required a sacrifice.

And maybe it did.

But the danger isn’t that wonder fades. It’s that we learn to distrust it so thoroughly we forget what it once made possible—attention, openness, a sense of aliveness that wasn’t contingent on outcome. Wonder, like grief, doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t leave us entirely. I think it waits, sidelined by caution, dulled by repetition, crowded out by the demands of a life that insists on being managed. What changes isn’t our capacity for wonder, but our willingness to trust it—to let it exist without demanding it justify itself. Growing older didn’t erase wonder. It taught me when to set it aside. The work now is not to recover it wholesale, but to recognize when it’s safe to let it back into a life spacious enough to hold it again.