So, I’m gonna tell you a story.

The country I was born in is a dictatorship. Life was shit. I left when I was a kid to a country with more freedoms. I grew up to learn what freedom meant. Then when I was 18, I decided to return to the place of my birth and lead a rebellion against the dictator that tyrannized my country and the tyrant was defeated and everyone lived happily ever after.

Just kidding (the italicized part is false), I just lived a boring life in the new country as a background character, and my parents are abusive, I had zero friends, and my new country is also becoming a dictatorship, and everything is falling apart, and I have zero qualities of what a movie hero has, I never felt brave enough to attend a protest because I fear torture as a non-native-born citizen, and I have no power to stop anything and I’m gonna die in a gulag, the end.

I mean… see… the second story is so boring, that why we wanna imagine a world where the first scenario happens. Otherwise the world is just too dark without any beacon of hope.

I believe our consciousnesses are narrative based. That’s the magic. Every thought idea etc is a narrative.

Stack up a bunch of narratives, hormones, and a grab bag of whatever instincts a few hundred million years of evolution has trickled down, shove it all in a meat sack, and viola! Behold a human!

For whatever reason, our brains developed the inclination/compulsion to imagine scenarios which greatly improved our odds of survival in the wild. In a biological sense, I figure stories and the like trigger that reward center in a way. Why people like different stories would come down to brain chemistry.

Stories are the medium through which we understand the world.