Once, a friend of mine was telling me that he’s writing a story about a guy who invents stories about himself because his reality is too boring to make any conversation. And recently, I was thinking that we all might be involved in fiction to some extent. Especially, in a time like this one when there is not much going on in our lives. We turn to fiction because when it comes to fiction, it could be a lot more interesting than our reality. I would say the more mundane our life is, the more we seek out the thrill of fictional realities. Now, this might be through the medium of films, books, or maybe inventing some by ourselves.
I think our social media is fiction in a way. Our timeline might be a little story that we are trying to weave about our life, a story where we are more beautiful, more adventurous, more interesting, and happier than we really are. It is an autobiography of a person whose candid moments overlap with some of our uncandid ones. It’s a place where our ideal self might live or it’s a story that we wish we could tell about our life.
It is believed that we perceive our life in a narrative sense. And we probably do that to satisfy our sense-making apparatus. We want to make sense out of our actions in the context of our life. And interestingly, if some past actions do not fit into the story, we retrospectively edit our memories to fit more precisely to the story that we believe about our life. And our mind does it so well that we don’t even notice it. This story structure not only makes sense out of our past but helps us make decisions going into the future, so that everything fits into the story. We edit the past and design our future.
Now, there are a lot of stories that our life might depict. So, how do we select a story that is worthy of depiction? We somehow need to make sense out of our choice of story for our life and this is where some might seek out the religion which could provide a fictional meta-narrative to the story of their lives. We would really like that the story we want to tell about our life to fit into an overarching meta-structure of existence. And maybe it is a logical extrapolation for our sense-making apparatus. We want our lives to make sense in the context of stories of other lives. In that way, we are not only part of something bigger than ourselves; we are something bigger than ourselves. Just as a cell of a being is not only a part of the being but it is in a way, the being itself. I’m going to shut up before I realize the irony.
By: Shailesh Dagar
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