Value

I love my Kindle. I've read quite a bit lately and that has lowered my stress levels overall. However, I started thinking about why we have such an interest in fiction and why the real world seems quite bland overall.

If you think about it, our current existence is quite marvelous. We can communicate with each other across great instances. We can get food without having to go out there and kill it ourselves. We can pop food into the microwave and get it cooked within minutes. The level of literacy in developed nations is astoundingly high. We can travel from one side of the world to the other in a little over a day. We know more about the universe than ever before, including what shape it is (toroidal), how old it is (13.7 billion years old) and how will it end (in darkness). Consider then, what our world would look like to someone from, say, the Victorian era. This would be a magical world! So why do we need fiction? Why do we escape from this reality by reading about things that don't exist?

I've pondered this for most of today and it's giving me a headache, so I'm calling it quits with this shallow (less than 72 hours processing time) solution: we need fiction because we crave excitement.

You see, it's not the fact that things are wonderful or magical in the stories we read. It's the fact that things happen that draw us in. It's not limited to just the medium of the printed word either - movies and radio serials have the same effect too. Case in point, my current fascination with the British scifi TV series, Doctor Who - every week, the Doctor and his Companions jump from one dire situation to the next of which the price of failure can range from a bunch of people dying to the entire universe collapsing. I mean, imagine the stress the poor Doctor must be under. He screws up, people die. Lots of people. And I want to escape into that world? What manner of insanity is this? Don't I have enough stress as-is in my current job without seeking more stress in a different universe-depends-on-you position?

Here's the funny part: I do. I do want to escape into these dire situations. If not the Doctor Who universe then some other one. Anything but here. Why? Simple - the stress level is stupidly high but if you do your job correctly, the payoffs are magnificent. Let's face it, if I do my best at my job, I'll get promoted into more of the same. I'm trying to do so, actually. However, if a TARDIS materialized in my room and I get whisked away as a Companion, I'd do it in a heartbeat? Why? Even though it's always a matter of life-and-death, there's excitement and value in doing those heroic things. Here we come to the heart of the matter: it's not the adrenaline rush that we look for, it's the fact that our lives would have meaning.

That's the crux of it: all these stories, the protagonists all live meaningful lives. Most of us don't. We go to our jobs and for most of us, we do it well. But at the end of the day, we go home, most of us to an empty apartment. How does that convey any value in one's existence.

My life has value. I know that. I just need to feel the love from my family to believe that. Is it enough? Well, I'm still reading on my Kindle...