Imaginary things can help us understand reality, and rapidly inform what we — individually and collectively — believe is true.
Think of the things that guide society at large and people in particular — religion, money, countries, politics, culture, and even mathematics. These are all concepts. Absent the human brain, they don’t exist. They are fictions we tell and mutually agree upon to achieve consensus. They are templates.
- Land exists, countries are fiction.
- God exists (up to you), scripture is fiction.
- Dollar bills and banks exist, economies are fiction.
- Distances are real, miles are fiction.
Don’t get carried away with this. This can be an appealing personal zeitgeist, but boy can it devolve into an insufferable worldview. Yeah, jamming on the constructed nature of reality can feel like intellectual skydiving, but nobody wants to sit next to the person who says money isn’t real while the dinner bill arrives.
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 (e.g., in wealth generation, but not the stock market).
Stories can convey lessons and the ways people act in ways that do not unfold in our real lives, yet can still be informative. If you’re an avid reader, you know there is something in fiction that is unattainable in life.
And don’t be a snob. For many people, a movie about a fictional football game has been more influential than everything Virginia Woolf has ever written. “The Stand” by Stephen King may impart more meaning to some than the Bible. That’s fine.
“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)