“To imagine is to remember the future.” — anonymous
The Rise of the Efficient Man
There’s a new species walking among us. Let’s call him the Efficient Man. He’s easy to spot.
He listens to podcasts at double speed while running on his treadmill desk. He eats lunch with one hand while scrolling TikTok with the other. At concerts, he doesn’t clap, doesn’t sing — he films. Because later, on Instagram, he’ll prove he was there.
When the waiter brings him a plate of food, he doesn’t lean in to smell it. He angles for the perfect photo. He lives inside a highlight reel, but rarely in the moment itself.
The Efficient Man is never bored. Because boredom terrifies him. Silence feels like death. Every gap must be filled with stimulation, multitasking, optimization.
But here’s the hidden cost: Efficiency is draining the oxygen from his imagination. The very thing that makes him human is being choked by the relentless need to do more in less time.
Why Imagination Is Survival
Imagination doesn’t thrive in efficiency. It thrives in spaces. In pauses. In slowness.
Think about it: when do your best ideas arrive? In the shower. On a long walk. On a train ride where your phone battery died. Those are not efficient moments. They’re “wasted time.” Yet they’re exactly where imagination sneaks in.
Neuroscience confirms this: when the brain is at rest, the default mode network activates, connecting dots between memories, emotions, and ideas. Daydreaming — often dismissed as laziness — is actually the soil of creativity.
Without imagination, we are trapped in the obvious. With imagination, we bend reality itself. That’s why, in the Ministry of Meaning, imagination comes first. It is the root skill — and awe is its daily fuel.
Awe: The Antidote to Numbness
Wonder interrupts. It derails efficiency. It steals your attention away from productivity and hands it back to life.
Psychologists define awe as the emotion we feel when we encounter something vast — something that forces our mental models to stretch. It makes us small, but in the best way.
Research shows awe reduces stress, increases generosity, and deepens our sense of meaning. It reconnects us with the world beyond ourselves.
And here’s the best part: awe is not rare. It’s everywhere, if you slow down enough to notice.
- The veins of a leaf lit by sunlight.
- A child laughing at bubbles floating in the air.
- The thought that your body is made of stardust from ancient supernovas.
These are micro-wonders. Small, overlooked moments that jolt your imagination awake.
Children: The Natural Teachers of Wonder
Watch a child in a garden after the rain. They’ll crouch down to study a worm wriggling in the mud, completely absorbed. Or they’ll spend five minutes tracing the patterns on a leaf while their parent hovers, impatient.
“Come on, you’ll be late for football practice.” “Hurry up, we need to get to your next class.” “Leave that worm alone, you’ll get dirty.”
But the child is right. The parent is wrong. That worm, that leaf, that puddle — these are not distractions from life. They are life. Children instinctively zoom in on micro-wonders. They don’t need to be taught how to marvel. They need to be protected from forgetting.
As adults, we need to relearn this discipline. Sometimes forcefully.
Practices to Linger
- Watch the sky change colors at dusk.
- Notice the symmetry of snowflakes or the geometry of seashells.
- Sit by a river and listen — without headphones, without distraction.
Children are not inefficient. They are experts in the very thing adults have lost: the ability to linger.
A Modern Practice of Wonder
So how do we keep awe on tap in the age of algorithms? Not with a hack. Not with a checklist. With a discipline.
Daily Cues
- Set an awe cue. Once a day, schedule a pause. No multitasking. Just stop. Look. Listen.
- Seek micro-wonders. Taste your food before photographing it. Run your hand across a tree’s bark. Let a stranger’s story surprise you.
AI as Spark, Not Substitute
Use AI to surface three strange things from science or nature you’ve never seen — a bioluminescent bay, a fungus that turns ants into zombies, a fish that can walk on land. Let AI widen your lens — but then go explore for yourself.
The key difference is this: AI can point, but only you can see. It can surface wonders, but only you can let them land.
The Danger of Outsourcing Wonder
If we let AI do all the work of wonder — if we only build on what it feeds us — we fall into a vicious loop. AI doesn’t imagine. It doesn’t dream. It learns from what already exists.
If we only recycle what AI offers back to us, we’ll be trapped in an echo chamber of the already-known — a civilization feeding itself its own leftovers.
The risk isn’t just stagnation. It’s decay. We’ll get more efficient. More optimized. More productive. But less human. That’s why the discipline of wonder matters — not just to enrich our days, but to protect our future.
Wonder as Rebellion
Wonder is not entertainment. It’s rebellion. Against numbness. Against distraction. Against the temptation to outsource your imagination to the machine.
To wonder is to say: I will not live inside an echo chamber. I will not be reduced to efficiency. I will not outsource awe.
Because in the end, wonder is not about worms, or leaves, or tardigrades. It’s about remembering that you are here. Alive. Capable of astonishment. And once imagination is awake, everything changes.
