Stories are Our Shields Against Life’s Absurdity
The dichotomy between fiction and nonfiction is a fiction
What do we depend on most in life?
To fulfill our social roles in our families, jobs, and nations, we depend on numerous tools and procedures. We rely on the accumulation of knowledge and on the trials and errors of history that inform our laws, which we aim to live by.
And in keeping the peace in our large societies that bring together many strangers, we wear a façade of ourselves, as it were, a persona that obliges us to swear fealty to certain prosocial principles even if they’re not as innocent or as self-evident as we’d expect. We may act as though this or that dogma, mantra, or creed redeems our life, quiets our doubts, and makes everything alright.
But perhaps nothing’s as common in human affairs as hypocrisy. We say we’ll do one thing, but we do another, or we perform certain routines even as we know secretly that they’re not fulfilling. Happiness is fleeting, and when events don’t proceed as planned and we’re faced with the world’s inhuman indifference, what’s left to comfort us, if anything?
Reason is supposed to be king in modernity, and we progress socially by figuring out how to get what we want with technological ingenuity. Yet consumers are among the…
