Whether it be movies, books, oral tradition. What is it we humans love so much about fictional tales?
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For whatever reason, our brains developed the inclination/compulsion to imagine scenarios which greatly improved our odds of survival in the wild. In a biological sense, I figure stories and the like trigger that reward center in a way. Why people like different stories would come down to brain chemistry.
It has always been so. When your sitting by the fire and the mind wanders, the days hunt comes crawling through your mind so you speak the story of the brave beast that nearly had you fooled and how thankful you are to have such a bounty. A remembrance of the sacrifice. The life taken so your children can flourish. A lesson for the young. Like a bee dancing in the hive, a tale with purpose.
It is our nature.
I believe our consciousnesses are narrative based. That’s the magic. Every thought idea etc is a narrative.
Stack up a bunch of narratives, hormones, and a grab bag of whatever instincts a few hundred million years of evolution has trickled down, shove it all in a meat sack, and viola! Behold a human!
Stories are medicine.
It’s one healthy way for our brains to process situations, dreams, aspirations, fears and experience. And it works.
They create and release tension, like a joke, which creates a pleasure burst greater than the discomfort of the tension.
Starting from basically birth, we learn. Learning is the process of creating models in our heads of corresponding causes and effects. This is what makes intelligence powerful. You can know, to a point, what is going to happen before it does. However, the causes in reality are complex and not always perceivable. When this happens, we experience emotional discomfort, the fear of the unpredictable. In stories, there is nothing but the story, so everything is built to create and then satisfy that sense of tension. This is the pleasure of learning.
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Stories carry ideas and ideas is what moves humans.
We are not satisfied with what is. As a species, our survival at some point depended on changing the world around us, not just enduring it.
Be it an uplifting story or a cautionary tale, the ideas inside carry meaning and individuals will build a part of their worldview around it.
Stories are the medium through which we understand the world.
I thought that was models?
Nah, modeling is something that has to be learned. Making up stories is much more natural and our usual first response. Even really basic things have, at times, been attributed to the lives and mechanations of spirits.
Think about how you consider your life: do you think of it as a model? Or a story?
Anecdotal, but I actually stopped liking fictional stories at some point, because I realized there’s such an abundance of cool and real stories I could be learning about, that it’s just like “Why are you telling me of a phoenix/dragon/Lavados when there’s black hawks setting fire to Australia?”.
I guess, it also ties in, though, that I don’t do escapism in general either, so I don’t either get lost in real stories, nor drugs.
I had a rough point in my life where escapism was crucial – I certainly don’t judge anyone wanting to step outside of this world for some time – but yeah, that changed my fundamental world view, so that I prefer to stay in the real world now.They’re fun lol. Shit gets boring sometimes.
