Maybe We Don’t Miss Childhood. Maybe We Miss Ourselves.

Noam Legras

1 day ago

4 min read

Saint-Exupéry wrote about adults isolated on tiny planets, obsessed with power, admiration, possessions and numbers. Eighty years later, we built an entire society around them.

Written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in 1943. In the middle of war. By a man who was a pilot and a resistance fighter. A man who would disappear during a reconnaissance flight just one year later. Now why does this tiny book, written for children, echo so deeply in our adult lives?

I only discovered The Little Prince when I was 20, even though I already knew that little blonde boy who travels from planet to planet. In the age of BookTok, fragments of the story had reached me long before the book itself had. I knew its thoughts about seeing with the heart, the mystery of tears and what truly makes something valuable.

But I wanted to understand why this little story had survived for so long. So naturally I read it.

And I finally understood. The Little Prince isn't really about childhood. It's about what happens to us when we leave it behind. We are all pilots lost in the Sahara. And the Little Prince, a reflection of the child we once were, reminds us who we used to be. He asks the questions that adults have forgotten how to ask. A child reading the book finds planes, tiny planets, talking animals and adventure. An adult finds themselves.

We Became the People on the Planets

The Little Prince travels from planet to planet, meeting adults who have each reduced their existence to a single obsession.

There is a king obsessed with authority, a vain man desperate for admiration, a businessman counting everything he owns and a drunkard trapped in shame. They seem absurd until you realise we’ve become them. The planets have simply changed. The vain man has Instagram. The businessman has Strava.

The king has LinkedIn. We laugh at these characters until we realise we’ve built adulthood around the same obsessions: optimise yourself, brand yourself, earn more, achieve more, become more. Keep counting.

Saint-Exupéry wrote these characters in 1943 as reflections of his own world, and somehow, more than 80 years later, we can still recognise ourselves in them.

Our Planets Got Wi-Fi

The strange thing is that our world is supposedly more connected than ever. The internet promised to collapse distance. Social media gave us access to people, cultures and communities we might otherwise never have encountered. Our planets were finally connected. And yet, we still ended up alone on them.

Friendships can become lifestyle comparisons. A holiday can become content before it has even become a memory. You arrive somewhere beautiful and already know the photograph you're supposed to take, the restaurant you're supposed to visit, the trend you're supposed to reproduce.

We compete with people we have never met and compare our lives to people we only know through screens. Childhood, with all its simplicity, slowly gets replaced by dreams of being impressive. We abandoned the child's gaze to conform to a society that increasingly asks us to prove our worth. And perhaps we stopped "taming" one another too. In The Little Prince, to tame someone is to create a bond. It is what makes one person different from thousands of others. But attachment also means accepting the possibility of loss.

As adults, we seem increasingly terrified of that risk. So we network instead. We collect acquaintances, followers and connections, then wonder why we feel lonely. Real intimacy is inefficient. It cannot be optimised or scaled. It requires time, vulnerability and the possibility of getting hurt. No wonder we keep trying to replace it.

Adults Love Numbers

Perhaps Saint-Exupéry's most painfully accurate observation about adulthood is our obsession with figures. Think about how much of modern life we have turned into numbers. Our salary, followers, weight, daily steps, screen time and even our sleep. We’ve turned our entire lives into numbers, then shockingly wonder why living feels like a performance review.

The child we used to be would probably find all of this ridiculous. They wouldn't care about networking or Strava. They wouldn't understand why a photograph matters more because 10,000 people saw it, or why being busy is something to brag about. A child wants to know whether you laughed, have a friend, love someone or whether you saw something beautiful today. The things that matter most are almost always the things we cannot put on a dashboard.

Growing Up Wasn't the Problem

This is what The Little Prince understands so well. Growing older is inevitable. Becoming one of the adults on those planets isn't. We don't have to spend our lives convinced that meaning will arrive once we're successful enough, productive enough, admired enough or optimised enough.

We can still look for the well. Return to our rose, made irreplaceable because we gave it our time, or to the fox, who reminds us that relationships become meaningful because we invest in them. We can return to ourselves.

I cried when I finished The Little Prince. Like the pilot, I had to let him go.

Adulthood can feel like an endless stretch of networking, life-maxxing, notifications and trying to become a slightly more impressive version of yourself. But that's exactly what the Little Prince asks us to resist. The child we used to be is still there somewhere, probably wondering why we made everything so fucking complicated. Why does everything have to be productive? Why does every hobby need to become a side hustle? Why are we so concerned with impressing people we don't even know?

The tragedy was never that we grew up but that we became all the adults The Little Prince warned us about.