Imaginary things can help us understand reality and rapidly inform what we believe is true individually and collectively.
Think of the things that guide society at large and people in particular. Religion, money, countries, politics, culture. Even mathematics. These are all concepts. Absent the human brain, they do not exist. They are fictions we tell and mutually agree upon to achieve consensus. They are templates.
- Distances are real, miles are fiction.
- Land exists, countries are fiction.
- Dollar bills and banks exist, economies are fiction.
- God exists (up to you), scripture is fiction.
The map ain’t the territory, but we’re good at pretending it is.
Don’t get carried away with this. This can be an appealing personal zeitgeist, but boy can it devolve into an insufferable worldview. Intellectual skydiving. Nobody wants to sit next to the person claiming money isn’t real when the dinner bill comes.
What’s important here is to realize that we choose to instill meaning into many concepts and systems that are fictional. You shouldn’t necessarily try to untangle these fictions from your life. But keeping this perspective can help you decide where to inject meaning and emotion (for example, caring about wealth generation, but not about the stock market).
If you’re an avid reader (or into movies, etc.), you know there is something in fiction that is unattainable in life. Stories can do more than entertain. They’re like bouillon cubes for reality, concentrated doses of what we may experience in life.
And fuck snobbery. Some movie about a fictional football game has probably been more influential than everything Virginia Woolf has ever written. For some people, The Stand by Stephen King imparts more meaning than the Bible. That’s fine. What moves you doesn’t matter so long as it moves you to appreciate this miracle of existence.
“They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.”
~Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (Book)
“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”
~Stephen King, On Writing (Book)
