Life is never as easy as it looks on TV or you read in a novel. Life is always a pain in the ass. You just have to keep going, and it kind of sucks — but everybody else has to do it, so I guess it’s kind of a group immunity; people put up with it because everybody else puts up with it, and you don’t really have much of a choice.

Why do we not notice that life in fiction is so easy? (Or if not easy, so much simpler than real life.) And how are we able to still enjoy the fiction, despite its being so simple? Why doesn’t it seem so glaringly and obnoxiously different than real life that we can’t enjoy it?

Because we wish life was simple and meaningful.

We want to romanticize life … we want to see it as worthwhile and fulfilling and all that kind of after-school-TV-special kind of crap. I guess the same reason that religion is popular — it’s an idealization. We can never really be like that, but it’s pretty to think so sometimes. Something to wish for.

Some we watch or read fiction to escape from the crappy reality that we’re stuck living in. And some people like a particular fiction so much that they reread it or rewatch it over and over and over again, if it’s long enough to forget the details of what it’s about — maybe it’s 7 seasons, each with 25 episodes per season; or it’s 7 books long, and it can be a comfortable substitute for real life.

Is it healthy to depend on fiction? I guess it doesn’t really matter — that’s what human brains are good at doing: imagining and making up stories; putting ourselves implicitly in those stories, even if they’re completely unrealistic; good guys vs. bad guys, happy endings, sad endings, all that crap. And we share those stories; it gives us something to do.

We do the mundane things of life (make enough money to buy groceries and enough for gas in the car or electricity in the car as the case may be) because we have to. We do all those boring things so that we can divert ourselves with fiction — with TV shows, with books, with video games, whatever floats your boat … with fun. You do work so that you can have fun.

No, i’m not great at writing entertaining stories, because it’s a pretty grim process; but sometimes i can stand it. Other times i can write a fluff piece like this.

Or sometimes i can let it go. I have to sometimes, because the whole thing has gotten to be a little bit depressing.

You’d like to think that good fiction helps you appreciate real life more, and i suppose that’s true occasionally.

But mostly i think it’s about survival. We dwell on fiction because we have to, just to make it through the day.

It’s a living.