Fiction Helps Us Process Real Life

    Some of us, perhaps most of us, spend many hours looking at, watching, following, thinking about fiction in various forms. This can include songs, or poems, or visual arts like paintings and sculptures, but more normally in the modern world means movies, television shows, and perhaps You Tube and other social media broadcasts. Although I have left out video games, which are huge ways of approaching fiction and fantasy for many people. And of course, literature in all its forms: books, plays, articles, comic books, and combinations of all of the above. We can act out fictitious characters among ourselves, playing the part of others, like "make believe" or role playing.

    Children do those fantasy characters, by acting or using dolls or action figures, but grown-ups also can play or even more realistically pretend to be something notionally or in a play or dress up role. 

    Why do we do all the fiction and fantasy? It helps us escape from perhaps more tedious or boring realities, sure, but I think that fiction and with it science fiction and fantasy help us process and deal with real life fears, concerns, curiosities, whims, wonderments, and problems that we wish to explore.

    I am not the first to write of this. Hundreds and thousands of philosophers and thinkers have thought of these ideas before. Religions, myths, creation stories.

    Oh, and me of all people forgot another type of fantasy or myth: sports teams, athletes, and games and acts of physical and mental endurance! How could I leave those crucial "non-reality" acts out of the picture? They are semi-reality contests against ourselves and others, usually, contests of skill and strength and know-how. They test us, but not for actual survival or reality dominance. It is done in the name of sport, not normally to the death, or intended to maim or kill anyone.

    All these games and fictionalized stories allow us to vicariously or more directly engage in the emotions and explorations of dealing with real threats, issues, and problems.

    We live in a world of monsters, as it were. They exist. The worst of us humans have been pretty bad. Before Idi Amin and Pol Pot and other atrocious humans of the 20th century, there were replete lists of others, mostly men and powerful leaders, who wreaked havoc and utter mayhem against other human beings in all parts of the planet.

    

    We still have such beasts and ogres in all times and stations. At the lower levels we have socio-paths and psychopaths, those who steal, lie, harm, and cause grief at individual and local levels; then we have the more powerful ones that take over villages or nations and countries, and empires. There are evil acts of all varieties that happen in our lives and history. Sexual abuses, fratricides, infanticides, genocides, and on and on. Whether big or small, at the little level or at the grander scales, we all deal with problems that we are working on. Destruction of animals or plants and trees, or other natueal environements.

    Of course! We work n...

    Whoops, got distracted; I do not know what I was going to write there.

    All the above to say, that we use fiction and fantasy to work out our own realities.

    We can combat and conquer, or at least more bravely face our fears and inner-most demons through stories of heroism, romance, adventure, plot machinations, evil plans of those that we dread, or those that perhaps some envy and wish to emulate. We like the heroes, but we identify with the anti-heroes, too.

    So there you have it. My takes on the whys and wherefores of fiction and fantasy.

    Now I will go read some more Star Wars short stories published in 1997...

    Beam me up, Spock.