Where has all the whimsy gone?
Where are the McDonald’s playpens with bold colors that carry children’s laughter? Where are the little plastic animals that lived inside our soap bottles? Where are the cereal-box prizes that made eating sugar-coated cornflakes enjoyable?
Even cartoons have become static and uniform lately with three-dimensional designs with giant heads and bug eyes taking priority over the once-calming, simple, silly lessons learned within the 30-minute period.
And even arcades, which were once safe havens for childhood nostalgia, have lost their whimsy.
Now, in order to play a game, you swipe a card. There’s no coin cup to shake as you walk from game to game. Even worse, you don’t get to feed your tickets into the machine and watch as the number slowly ticks up while the tickets fly through your hand (a feeling I can vividly remember).
So yeah, we’ve managed to remove the whimsy from arcades, too.
To help you better understand what I mean when I ask, “Where has all the whimsy gone?” I should probably explain what I mean by whimsy. I could just give you the Webster’s definition, but that would fall squarely into the “no whimsy” category.
In my eyes, whimsy is anything that adds a little spark to an experience — the small, unnecessary touches that don’t have to be there, but make everything feel just a bit more alive.
And it can be simple, like a restaurant adding cherries to a Shirley Temple. I swear, my heart sinks just a little when one gets placed in front of me, and there are none to fish out of the glass or spear dramatically with a little plastic sword. The sword definitely adds extra whimsy.
See? Simple.
And if you zoom out a bit, I’d argue we’re trending toward a whimsy-free society.
I was born in 2001 (which, unfortunately, means I’ll be 25 this year, and I’m choosing to ignore that as long as possible), but being a 2001 baby means I still caught the tail end of the ‘90s when things felt a little louder, a little more colorful, and a little more whimsical.
When you really get down to it, the answer to this question seems to sit in one big place: capitalism.
Now, before anyone gets up in arms, I’m not saying capitalism is the root of all evil, and we need to run off into the woods and start trading berries for goods. I like having options. I like convenience. I like being able to get things when I want them.
But I do think somewhere along the way, the goal quietly shifted.
Creating products has almost always been about the market and selling, but it felt like corporations had some pride in those products. Now? Not so much.
It stopped being about creating things people enjoy and became solely about creating things that sell.
And those are not always the same thing.
Because when the goal is profit above all else, you don’t take risks. You don’t add the unnecessary little details, and you don’t spend the extra time making something feel special if it doesn’t directly translate into more money.
You streamline it. You standardize it. You make it as broadly appealing as possible.
You make it beige.
That’s how you end up with rows of identical cars in the same three colors. It’s how every coffee shop starts to look like a slightly different version of the same place. It’s how homes lose their quirks in favor of resale value and modernization.
It’s how arcades lose their coins and ticket counters, because cards are more efficient, like the swipe of a credit card.
And again, none of these changes are huge on their own. They all make sense when you look at them individually.
But when you zoom out, they add up.
They add up to a world where everything works really well… and feels the exact same.
Where every experience is optimized, but nothing feels particularly memorable because the little bits of joy — the things that didn’t need to be there — slowly disappear because they weren’t worth the trouble.
And that’s kind of a tragedy.
Because whimsy, by definition, isn’t efficient. It isn’t necessary.
Whimsy is taking the path full of wild flowers and pretty birds, even though it’s an hour longer than the paved path that runs straight through.
It’s the feel-good.
And when everything is built around what makes the most money, the first thing to go is the stuff that just exists for the sake of joy.
So maybe that’s where the whimsy went. It didn’t vanish, and it wasn’t stolen out from under us. We just slowly squeezed it out of every experience.
And maybe we have the opportunity to get it back. It isn’t extinct yet. It just shows up in the smaller, quieter ways now — the places where someone chose fun over function, even when it didn’t make the most sense on paper.
It’s in the extra cherry, the brightly painted door, and a chalkboard menu.
Things that happen because someone decided it was worth it, for the hell of it.
Maybe getting whimsy back isn’t about some big culture shift or tearing everything down and starting over. Maybe it’s about choosing it when we can. Letting things be a little impractical and unnecessary.
And maybe if enough of us start choosing that again, we won’t have to keep asking where the whimsy went.
We’ll just start seeing it everywhere again.
