Watch a six-year-old play. They’re not thinking about their future. They’re thinking about the sandbox.

Young kids are completely inside what they are doing. No part of them is monitoring how it looks, what comes next or whether this counts as progress, which is why an hour with a cardboard box can be genuinely absorbing. The capacity does not vanish as you get older, it just gets crowded out by the monitoring.

Watch a small child play for five minutes and notice what they are not doing. Then find something you can do that badly and that seriously. Draw, play, build something with no purpose. The measure of whether it worked is simple: you forgot to check the time.