a simple forest felt great as a kid, awesome, hours of exploration. but now it is a collection of trees, albeit nice and pleasant to walk in, but it doesn't fill me with wonder overly much.
i can't describe it properly. is it just wanderlust or something else or?

I don't know, when I hear the phrase wanderlust, I just think of mentally stunted trust fund recipients that are trying to sound more intelligent than they actually are.

People from the 3rd world still have this innocent sense of wonderment, as well as some of the old people around my hometown in the western US, who never got drawn out of themselves by postmodern irony or by the willful cynicism which >>2862804 kindly illustrates. No you're never gonna go back to the way it felt to be a kid, but you can still chase wisdom and joy, it's out there in abundance, that's the great thing about the world, it never changes, only you do.
I once went hiking across a temperate rainforest, I won't say where, which had recently been gifted from the gov't back to the native people. The first thing they did was ransack all buildings and stop maintaining the trails. Nothing from my maps or research reflected the reality of what was there. The point is I had to shred all my expectations, and so was able to accept what I found with complete innocence, rather than try to assert myself within the space. Then add to that the feeling of complete isolation and the knowledge I was 6 days on foot from my destination. The result was like crawling out of Plato's cave and feeling something real for the first time. Like finding out Narnia is real. I've had that feeling 2, maybe 3 times in my life, always while hiking somewhere I had no map or preconceived expectations. I'm sure that's the way early explorers felt when walking across the Americas for the first time.
It's important to note, you don't have to seek out untrammeled wilderness to get this feeling. You just need the realization that the cynicism implanted in your brain (blame 4chan, instagram and Alltrails) is an artificial thing you weren't born with, and you don't need to take it with you into the woods.

>>2862935
>People from the 3rd world still have this innocent sense of wonderment
>The first thing they did was ransack all buildings and stop maintaining the trails

I'm going to be brutally honest with you. Neither of those two points are good things. Failing to maintain stewardship over the land is especially disappointing. It's one of the most basic things a human can do...

>>2862935
I felt that looking at the susquahanna river for the first time

>>2862956
theres a jillion different overlooks of the susq at various lengths of its course