As we grow older, the shimmer of everyday life seems to fade. The grass doesn’t look as green, Christmas comes much faster than it used to and the excitement we had as kids fades somewhere along the way to adulthood.
With age comes wisdom and the realization that not everything is as perfect as it may have been at a ripe, young and oblivious age. The rose-colored glasses we wore in our youth faded away along with adolescence. Between negative news, social media and meeting more people with fiercely conflicting perspectives, the magic of childhood innocence and infatuation with life is wiped away and replaced with a harsh and apprehensive outlook.
It’s no secret that college students are under a tremendous amount of stress. Almost 50% of undergraduates feel like most days, they are too stressed to function. Between credit hours, extracurriculars and trying to maintain a social life, it can feel like there is no time to take in the world around us. Students just don’t have time to “stop and smell the roses,” and honestly, the roses just don’t feel like they’re worth stopping for anymore.
Drug and alcohol use among college students is sadly seen as a social standard, and in 2020, around 37% of college students were reported to have regularly used illegal drugs or misuse alcohol. When life doesn’t feel fun anymore, young adults are turning to any possible resource to bring back that excitement.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. That innocence and infatuation with life didn’t just disappear; rather, it has been suppressed by the loss of blissful ignorance. Finding magic in the mundane isn’t impossible — there are people all around us proving so.
Insert two friends from Utah — Logan Jugler and Boone Hogg, the men behind the Instagram account @officialstickreviews. I know what you’re thinking: a social media account dedicated entirely to sticks? Yes, it’s as unusual as it sounds, but it has started a community of limb lovers from around the world. What began as two friends posting videos of themselves with sticks has evolved into submissions from people far and wide sharing their love of nature.
“Sometimes it’s a bit, with people leaning into the internet-ness of it,” Hogg said in an interview with National Review. “But a lot of the time it’s a sincere thing that people are connecting with. They’re appreciating something as basic as a stick.”
Now sporting an astounding 1.3 million followers, these friends are bringing back the joy of childhood innocence and reigniting the spark of being a child in awe of nature.
And they aren’t the only ones shining a spotlight on things we tend to literally walk right past. Bill Young is a commercial pilot. What most would see as a tedious job filled with many days far from home, Young saw as an opportunity to share snippets of his life that he found beautiful. With constant travel comes constant hotel stays with many different interior designs. Young posted a picture of a unique carpet pattern in one of the hotels he stayed at to his Instagram in 2015, and after a while started a separate account dedicated to his captivation for carpeting.
Young’s daughter Jill posted her dad’s account on Twitter, and it sent him into social media stardom. Bill never expected any sort of following, but rather saw it as an outlet to share his beautiful findings with others.
“I was always surprised he never put in effort to get a whole bunch of followers,” Jill told BuzzFeed News. “He didn’t really care about that. He just really liked carpet, and that made me really happy.”
Though Young and the Jugler-Hogg best friend duo share vastly different (and rather niche) interests, they certainly share one thing in common: showing the world that the things we pass by in everyday life are actually worth stopping to take in. Life is all about the big picture, and the bigger picture is made up of these little everyday moments. No additives necessary — just a pure love of the life we live.
Days can be hard, especially as a college student. It can feel as though sometimes there isn’t a single happy thing to find in the world around us. But there always is. Every day may not be good, but there is always something good in every day— it’s all a matter of perspective. So the next time you see a stick on the ground or walk on some cool carpet, see a quad squirrel or that one guy on his roller skates, stop to take it in for a moment. You never know what might spark joy and fan the flames of childlike wonder inside of us all.
