Why are we drawn to fiction? And 4 ideas on why we are passers-by for meaningful stories

Intro

Why are we drawn to fiction? Why is it that some fiction arouses certain feelings in us that are strong to a degree gran than almost anything we can find in real life? Why do they arouse feelings that appear so pure and real when it’s all fake? Perhaps these feelings are not consistently stronger but, when taken in their entire array, they surely constitute a more colourful palette. In my case, it is almost as if important real life feelings were punctuation periods, and feelings mediated through fiction were like commas.

To elaborate: some real life events along with their accompanying feelings punctuate my life as periods would from paragraph to paragraph. They usually are few and far between and they are not terribly varied. This is probably because they reflect the necessary repetitiveness of modern life.

On the other hand, the feelings that fiction elicits appear more often, because we soak our minds with constant stories from various media: novels, movies, series, journalistic retellings, stories in conversation, images, music, etc. Thus, they are commas that are found interspersed in moments of life, like little pauses in the continuous narration of our life experiences. Not only are they more frequent, but also more varied. They stand as a larger spectrum of emotional colours originating from fragments of life-contexts wildly different to ours, and of life stories that we could possibly, although highly-unlikely, live in an ideal sequence of events.

Are these emotional colourings (of a palette of such variety that real life cannot compete with them) one of the core reasons that draw us so irresistibly to fictional stories? If so, why can’t we live our lives in a similar way, through a series of moments of a variety and significance comparable to that in fiction?

These are thoughts that come to me when I pass by bookshop displays and see books tidily arranged by genre, forming a pretty sight with their eye-catching covers. Not only do they offer buyers a story to let themselves be drawn into, but when arranged along other books as a group of stories, all in one display space, they act as an invitation to passers-by to dream of the act of reading all those stories and live halfway between their dissatisfying lives and the worlds that we think deserve to be real more than ours. The bookshop itself acts as a symbol of our human desire to reach deeper into our fantasies of a richer, meaningful existence, and to further project our imaginations into the world.

So why is it that most of us can’t live our lives in a way that puts our existence at the same level?

This is a non-exhaustive set of answers that I came up with in the form of questions:

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Is it because the structure of our lives negates the possibility of living in such a way, making it too risky or downright impossible?

The novelist David Forster Wallace once said that in his youth television, the main source of information and entertainment of his time, was his snorkel to the universe. I think that this snorkel metaphor provides a lot of good material for thought.

A key characteristic of snorkelling is that while it let’s you keep your head underwater for a long time, it doesn’t allow you to dive deeper than the snorkel’s length.

When consuming fiction, we are dipping our heads into a more intensely lived world where meaningful things happen continuously, where feelings are heightened, where there is a sense of movement towards something, of following a trail, and there is a sense of interlinked continuity in events. This fictional world inhabits waters where life decisions that break their characters away from mundane stasis are continuously taken, where there is an authentic connection among people and between people and their actions.

But with our snorkel we are witnessing all of this while stuck on the surface. We would quickly run out of oxygen if we dove deep into those waters without it. So we only remain partially connected to those waters, feeling their temperature, their density, their bobbing movement, but we are not inside them, like those characters who live there.

And we would metaphorically drown in those waters because in the fully embodied experience of our lives, where everything we are in the present moment is linked to the cause and consequence of all of our actions and all of what happens to us, the stakes are higher. We have much to risk. Our intuition tells us that if we try to live with the same intensity, our lives would quickly unravel. Living for adventure is dangerous in a real world where we are supposed to be gardeners, digging out the weeds of our lives and planting stationary things in a slow, patient, repetitive process that doesn’t make any real promises. In real life adventure, a couple of mistakes can leave us adrift, stuck and away from all that which we were cultivating towards our fuzzy aims for the long run.

Still, the contradiction remains. We consume these stories because they have some semblance to reality, and that resonates with us. At the same time, we consume them to experience feelings that we hardly get in real life, and we are seemingly unable produce that richer experience of life in our embodied reality. We look around us and imagine such commitment to a mission seems impulsive, reckless, too risky. So, again we ask ourselves: why can’t we make of our lives something like what we experience through fiction, something that gives us the same feeling we get when we have a book that is waiting for us, that we are midway through, a book that we are impatient to open again and pick up from where we left off?

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Is it because we never learned how to do it in the first place?

What if we were able to locate these special moments that invite us to begin an ‘adventure’, but there is never a perfect sequence of circumstances that can take us all the way through to its satisfying completion? Maybe we will do the wrong thing at some point in the very beginning, a mistake that cuts the adventure short and breaks any possibility of it developing further.

One of the tricks is to learn to locate these opportunities. Some of these opportunities can become apparent as something out of the ordinary that is beckoning to you, or a veiled opportunity presenting itself to you. They can also manifest when you notice yourself being confronted with something that you feel you need to change, or when an external force creates an adversity that you realise can choose to resist.

The other trick is to learn to ride the wave. We can learn to follow the adventure through all the way to the end it deserves. It is tempting, or strictly an unconscious product of habit to let it end with a lackluster whimper as we abandon it and turn our attention towards something else. In doing so, we revert back to the muted predictability of our daily lives as gardeners. So there is a need for a skill to understand when sticking to a certain continuity in your efforts is called for.

In their 2011 book “All Things Shining”, Sean Dorrance Kelly and Hubert Dreyfus call this ability to ride the wave of adventure as ‘physis’. It is an ancient Greek term that they borrowed from Homer and interpreted it in their own particular way. In their view, ‘physis’ denotes those moments where something happens that momentarily changes your perception of everything around you (and possibly also that of the people around you). It’s an extraordinary moment that swells up in an instant and calls you to act in a certain way. It organises your perception in the sense that everything around you becomes somehow connected by a single thread that gives it cohesive meaning, and you are asked deep in your gut to follow that thread. And that thread that links everything momentarily is the possibility of something extraordinary manifesting itself at its best, or showing flickers of the possibility of manifesting itself at its best.

In short, in the context of learning to find that sense of meaningful adventure, physis is about developing a keen attention for these moments that with the right predispositions we notice are abundant in everyday life. At the same time, it is about learning to allow ourselves to follow these threads with an open heart. Moreover, we follow them carrying a sense of their importance. We are driven forward along their path by curiosity and determination, because they will always ask you to detour from your usual routine. After all, in their deepest essence, stories are about change, and change needs a degree of self-initiated action, of focused reaction and of courage. ‘Physis’ is that instant when a moment asks you to become a part of it, because you can sense in your whole being a glimmer of the extraordinary, and you leave aside any fixed preconceptions that you follow for making decisions because they might break the possibility of living through it as they are made to help you revert back to the main axis of your gardener-like, repetitive life (this is not to say that the latter is to be avoided, it is essential for a stable and prosperous life, but we can learn to put it aside for a while and follow ‘physis’ moments).

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Is it because we actually prefer to witness and experience them vicariously but we are not convinced that it’s not worth trying to live it ourselves?

Or more simply, it could be that we prefer to keep our distance, to dip our heads into the water’s surface, snorkel in mouth, and enjoy the view.

Maybe we are not willing to take all those risks or do not have the energy to do it.

In fact, maybe living these adventures is a form of privilege. Just a select few will ever have the chance to do so, when all events align in such a way that they can follow the whole thing through to its completion. It’s very reasonable to say that many of the most moving stories are just implausible in real life, that they are full of lucky breaks and once in a lifetime coincidences that move them forward. If having the opportunity to live a defining adventure was only for a privileged few, then it is good that others could at least live them vicariously in a different format: that of mediated fiction.

Or maybe the ‘invention’ of the story is a blessing (if it can be called an invention so much as the harnessing of fire is one). Maybe stories are a powerful, almost primal technology that can give us all the best bits of an adventure without having to suffer the actual downsides?

I don’t believe this point is true. I believe that the whole package of embodied experience is what makes it worth it. Stories can offer us glimpses of transcendent experiences, glimpses of that wider palette of emotional colours. However, as I said before, these are only on the surface. They are not necessarily inferior, they are just qualitatively different experiences that we would do good not to mistake one as a substitute for the other. When we live something in the real world, the effects are much more profound and personal because the experience is interwoven with the entire chain of cause and consequence of our lives. Contrary to fiction, what is happening in our ‘adventure’ is linked to what happened before in our personal stories and what was already existing there before. More than that, it is certainly connected with what will happen in the future as it will become one of its consequences. Fictional stories might offer the full package of the perfectly crafted story, but you enter that story with no prior relation to anything that inhabits it and you exit it only with the memory of what happened, but no direct impact in your world.

In the end, I think that it’s a mistake to completely close off your sense for physis, be it because you think these things happen to a select few and it depends solely on a lucky arrangement of events, be it because you deem it essential to stick to a predefined set of principles as to what constitutes prudent behaviour to stay on the main axis of your so-called ‘life project’. As I said before, learning to notice the possibility of an adventure and learning to honor the importance that you deep down feel fulfilling it has, can bear rewards that will always be worth it in the long run. If not a tangible reward for your immediate reality in the immediate future, then at least it will first be intangibly rewarding for your sense of self-identity.

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Or perhaps it is a form of replication: It can be a form of escapism but at the same time a search for a model to replicate?

This idea has been explored non-stop since antiquity. Something interesting about this suggestion is that it brings us back to our human desire to live our lives as these adventures. This is the idea of the adventure as an archetype, an almost platonic model of how an adventure should develop that remains exclusively as an ideal (that is, something to aspire towards but seldom possible to replicate perfectly).

I have two thoughts on this.

The first one is about the power of symbols. If one of the essential qualities of symbols, metaphors and analogies is that they stand for something else because they share many similarities (at the same time, they serve to highlight precisely these similarities in their metaphorical equivalent), then this means that there are certain common threads, universal types of interactions that run beneath the world’s phenomena. Still with me? To illustrate this, one can use the classic metaphor of a ship at sea to refer to a government. Some similarities between these two are that there needs to be some entity steering its direction and keeping it afloat (that can translate to a harmonious society and an effective, legitimate government), that there needs to be skill and proper organisation to face the inevitable “storms” (a metaphor within a metaphor), that there needs to be clear communication and cooperation between all aboard in order to succeed, and so on. Here, the metaphor reveals more abstract, universal types of interactions that happen almost equally in both cases. It is a metaphor because more concrete aspects of this comparison such as the ship being made of wood, or it floating in the sea do not apply to a government.

Thus, in the context of archetypal stories, it is true that many of them are downright impossible to replicate because of concrete aspects such as being the son of a mafia godfather or a teenage witch with a talking cat venturing out on her own for the first time. Nonetheless, the abstract elements all have a real world equivalent. This means that they can all be replicated within the realm of real world possibility by switching all of their implausible aspects with symbolically parallel real world elements that relate to them through these common, more abstract threads. With this logic, even archetypical heroes can be replicated symbolically, because it is highly probable that what you most admire about them, what draws you to them is not what is implausible about them, but what is essential and thus possible in the real world. To me, that emotionally charged will to replicate the admirable is a feature of our human nature, and the ‘invention’ or ‘discovery’ of the story is no more than an extension of this as much as a fishing rod is an extension of our arms.

The second thought related to stories as a practice of replication relates to the first one. If, as some classic storytelling principles state, moving, resonant stories that in consequence we would wish to replicate normally follow one of a few essential structures, this means that metaphorically we can follow these structures as well. In practice, the structure and abstract equivalents of the elements of the story (mission, protagonist, friendships, values, prize, etc.) work as a template that helps us map our lives. They provide a beginning and an end to our current potential adventure. Therefore the trick is not exactly to apply the templates that resonate the most with us in our lives, because we are not looking to force the arrangement of our lives into constraining structures. The trick is to learn to see what template our current ‘physis’ intuition finds us in. And not only that, but also learning to identify in what part of that story template we are currently in, so we allow ourselves to keep on track towards the adventure’s fulfilment and have an intuition of what is necessary. When you know where you are, you know where you came from and you know where to go.

For example, we might find ourselves in the pre-climax part of our story, even though we made a great effort, we made friends, confronted antagonistic forces to get somewhere, we find ourselves in a slump. Everything seems to be going wrong, our efforts might turn out to be for nothing and the climb seems steeper and steeper. If we know that we are here, we know where we came from. We can look back and see how much we’ve grown and learnt, how much we’ve built and understand that. the effort was never for nothing and that you still have it in you. Likewise, we know where we are and we know where we are going. Now that you arrive at this point, you are not here from nothing, but from the weight of all that you’ve done to get to you final destination. You haven’t lost sight of that final destination and looking back you remember where you were going, and whether course correction, further fighting or unexpected realisations are impending. At the same time, understanding the meaningful continuity of this path within the template of a story (meaningfulness is one of the key elements of a story template) serves as a great emotional resounding motivator to keep you moving forward instead of leaving the story aside to walk back to a safer repetitive, metaphorically unmoving existence. Physis and overlaying story templates is about looking at the greater picture of what is happening. It is asking yourself, how does this fit in the story? But certainly this kind of intuitive far-sightedness requires a level of determination, of values, of true desires, of direction.

So I go back to my point of applying stories as templates, for committing to missions in life and following them through. Because more important than anything, another crucial point of stories is that they need to end, many things in our lives are asking for a conclusion and some of us can live decades without addressing them. We love certain stories for very legitimate reasons, and the feelings they give us and that make us continuously return to them are a testament to that. And they need not be confined to remain a momentary, disconnected moment of respite imbued in bittersweet real emotion. Maybe if we were more transparent about this, stories signal to us the need to replicate something, and thinking. ofthem as reservoirs of metaphorical real-life equivalents and of reality-mapping templates is a step into making living more aligned to them (read: more meaningfully) a possibility.

I wish living more meaningfully could happen as naturally as it does in beautiful stories, where characters drive the plot by following their own will to a satisfying ending. But as I see it, it is becoming more normal than not to become trapped in a world of distraction and highly insufficient, short-term consolations for the lack of meaningful adventure in our lives. So ideally, thinking quite literally about the metaphorical structure of adventure and where we are currently placed in them can at least be a first step to integrating this in our perception and decision-making processes while it slowly becomes second-nature. Then maybe it can happen as naturally, as obviously as in those stories, but this time they are our own.

Sometime, in a continuation of this text I will talk about how some templates might be better than others, and how they can give meaning to actions that other less positive templates would consider misguided or useless.

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