Adulthood strips childhood things of their accumulated meaning

Evidence

The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coq football boots was just a pair of football boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn’t, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1980

Categorization

• SEED: The claim that the same physical world loses meaning across a lifetime — not changes, but empties out toward meaninglessness — is a striking essay angle on nostalgia and object attachment.
• XREF: connects to: Even well-meaning Europeans’ childhood racial imagery persists into adulthood — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 708; Cultural meanings are unstable and shift with the social field; Youth values the process of life while adults cling to its objective forms — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 854 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Cultural meanings are unstable and shift with the social field #exemplifies (0.55)
• Even well-meaning Europeans’ childhood racial imagery persists into adulthood #qualifies (0.50) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 708