This might be a little rambly…
It takes time and experience to give proper value to things in our lives. When you were a child, tangibility and immediacy were important. Christmas was about the gifts you would play with for a month or two. Though without those gifts, our imaginations would not have developed in quite the same way. Children are also happier, because they lack what causes a lot of unhappiness in people: worry. Deadlines and appointments cause us worry. Dread is just another more serious form of worry.
Tests, grading, homework, applications, health.
Strangely enough, little kids don’t watch the news. And what is one of the primary topics of discussion on the news? Impending doom, freak accidents, people in trouble, deaths, murders, fires, everday things that could happen to us. It makes us worry. Watching/reading about the news is a lot like reading about history before it’s had a chance to be filtered by the passage of time.
It’s also amusing that they say worry takes years off of you life, because it takes years of your life to start worrying. It’s like our lifespan decreases with time.
Worrying is also a lot like forecasting. We think about all the things that could go wrong, so we can plan accordingly. But life is too complex, and the number of things that could go wrong greatly outnumber the number of things that could go right.
That’s why ignorance is such bliss. Yes, it’s selfish, but you do what you can to be happy.