More is less

Creativity owes to moments that bestow upon us space to recall, think and feel the pain or joy of vicissitudes of life. But in this age when we are afflicted with the curse of more — overfed, overprotected over-occupied — the untenanted mind has become an extinct species. More toys, more gadgets or more preoccupations have deprived us of the ability to stick to one tangible or intangible phenomenon. Abundance has usurped from us the Wordsworthian 'inward eye ... the bliss of solitude'.

In a well-known empirical study in 2018, Carly Dauch and colleagues of The University of Toledo, USA, tested the hypothesis that 'an environment with fewer toys will lead to higher quality of play for toddlers'. They found that toddlers provided with fewer toys engaged in longer durations of toy play and played with toys in a greater variety of ways. To give less is to trust more — trust their capacity to create, to cope, to find joy.

'More' is camouflaged as parental generosity, which is the depletion of parents' patience in reality. The 'more' is actually less: less curiosity, less imagination, less wonder, less patience. However, insufficiency creates emptiness — the untenanted mental space — which lets metacognitive ponderings echo back.

To sit unengaged has become a mark of unsuccess in this age. Children are programmed to follow fanatically the deadening routine — school, homework, academy and extra late-night home coaching. Kim John Payne, a consultant to 250 US schools, says, "The less is still more. Kids don't need many toys to play, or any particular one. What they need most of all is unstructured time."

The characteristic feature of childhood is to be happy without a reason. Deepak Chopra says, "Be happy for no reason, like a child. If you are happy for a reason, you're in trouble, because that reason can be taken from you."

Despite being mired in multiple sources of information and knowledge — schools, academies, print media, electronic media, the internet and now AI — our students fail to traverse the journey from information to knowledge to wisdom. Exposed to everything but lassoed to nothing.

The heart muscles of resilience of children who are well cushioned against frustration, deprivation, loss or waiting, start atrophying. The early gratification of children's wishes makes them throw tantrums very often. Pampering through helicopter parenting deprives children of hard-learnt lessons.

The true opposite of 'more' is not scarce; it's 'enough'. Enough is the provider of the raw material of wonder: time, space and imagination. An encumbered mind enjoying no respites doesn't find moments to think out of the box. Such a mind never ventures on lateral thinking. It always remains bereft of serendipitous eureka moments.

With fewer options around, children learn to get along with what is available. It might curb the tendency of abrupt snapping of human relationships. Children also learn how to stick hard and long to things — an attitude which is a sine qua non for bracing the ordeals in the successful achievement of goals.

Whereas scarcity nurtures more sustained imaginative engagement — a prerequisite for any creative venture — overload spawns rushed creativity. The latter slows down neural processing to ferret out quick answers. The long trail of statements, particularly in mathematical problems, perplexes students who are accustomed to continuously shifting the locus of their attention. Mindfulness is another casualty of a surfeit of supplies. Quoting Kim again: "After all, it's not just what you make of your time, it's whether you have the time to make it your own."

Parents are not by default prone to securing abundance for their children. Firstly, the parents who had faced deprivations in their own childhood happen to be more sensitive to their children's comfort. They don't want the scars inherited from their childhood to be the legacy of their children. Behind parental generosity lurks the parental fear — fear of their child lagging behind, getting bored or suffering discomfort. Secondly, the insecurity strutting menacingly in the outer world — child abuse, child abduction, street traffic accidents — leaves no option for parents but to resort to repletion.