Do you remember what life was like when you were seven? I was thinking about this today while eating a raspberry ice cupcake.

The adult in me came up with that just now—”raspberry ice cupcake”—partly because it sounds kind of awesome, but mostly to distinguish it from what it should have been (a raspberry ice pop) but was not. I had run out of room in my hyperspecialized 7-minute ice pop-making device, so the leftover syrup went into a silicon cupcake mold instead. Then it sat, uncovered, in my freezer for days before I remembered it was there and decided, experimentally, to eat it.

Seven-year-old me would have just called it an ice pop, unconventional shape be damned. She would have eaten not with the probing palate of a critic, but with a sense of sheer delight at the miracle of refrigeration. She would have forgiven the rough graininess of the ice particles, the result of a freezing process much longer than 7 minutes. She would even have ignored the fact that the flavor was ever so slightly colored by that mysterious and unseemly freezer taste. That is, if she even knew what a freezer taste was.

To a 7-year-old, an ice pop was an ice pop was an ice pop if it were cold, juicy, and great at staining cheeks and shirt fronts. None of this stuff about the crystalline structure of ice being different depending on how you froze it. Or the shape needing to resemble an iPod with a stick going through it. Or the taste needing to be totally pure and free from invasive freezer esters. By my current standards, anything violating these principles of ice pop perfection resulted in disappointment. Twenty years ago I would have thought it was the greatest thing ever.

As you get older, life cannot help but get more dissatisfying. You get this thing called culture (or knowledge, I forget which it is) ingrained in you, and it makes you more particular. It makes decisions harder. You start to crave that rarefied level of fine-grained control, which isn’t always easier to achieve.

Maybe this is why we adults lust after simplicity the way we do. We have magazines named after it, objects praised because they exhibit it, people paid to come into our lives and provide it. We say we want simplicity, but really, I think we just want to be kids again.

Kids don’t care about sorting laundry. When I was little I remember doing my own laundry every week. Everything went in at once, on the one setting I knew how to operate. Nonetheless, everything came out satisfactorily wearable no matter what I did or did not do.

Kids also don’t care about the color of people’s skin or what neighborhood they are from. I grew up in a very average Kentucky suburb and my two best friends in elementary school were African-American and Latino, both from less desirable neighborhoods. To me they were just other kids I went to school with, as valid a candidate for Best Friendship as any. Though as time went on, I discovered that they were culturally and socio-economically Others. I haven’t heard from them in the last 19 years.

Life as a kid is marked by a lack of distinctions, choices, and gradients. Of course, sometimes having those things are good; they help us tell apart the edible mushroom from the poisonous ones. They help us navigate a world shrouded in shades of gray. But in the case of laundry and friends (I’m slowly discovering that pretty much everything in life can be turned into an allegory involving laundry or friends), we could perhaps be a little less antsy about it all.

How many things in life would actually be tons better if we cared a little less? How much more joy would we get out of each bite of ice pop? Each subway ride with strangers so different from us? Each freshly laundered sheet tinted a delicate pink by an errant red shirt?

I want to experience being seven again, but of course I can’t. Besides, I don’t want to actually be seven again—that would be terrifying, in another way. The best I can do, is to remind myself, when things seem to get too dissatisfying again, to step back and pretend that I don’t know enough yet to be really bothered by it.