The Staleness of Fiction

It is why we buy books, watch movies, or turn on the television... It causes us to spend countless hours of most of our lives engaged in this source of amusement. The tragedy of it lies in these two facts: it is addicting, and it is natural.

...It's called fiction.

Fiction is a diversion of the mind from present reality to some fantasized destination. It encourages us to evaporate our focus from our surroundings into make-believe. What's so great about fiction???

I think it's because of the fact that it has no limits. For example, in the realm of fiction, your free to fly on a magic carpet with a beautiful princess through the desert Kingdom of Agrabah. Free to fight Pirates and soar through the skies of Neverland. Liberated to ride out alongside King Arthur and his Knights as they take on the armies of the invading Anglo-Saxons; to become Captain of the Black Pearl, the fastest sailing ship ever to set stir the waves of the sea; to by chance discover the lost and golden city of Atlantis; to fight for power among the Gods of Mount Olympus; to find romance in Orange County; to follow a yellow brick road with a lion, scarecrow, and tinman as your companions; to be able to decipher the mysteries of a crime scene in Miami; to fight off the evils which threaten the land of Narnia; or perhaps to discover that your a wizard and a celebrity in a world of magic where everyone knows of the legend of how you, Harry Potter, received that lightning bolt scar on your forehead...

I believe that imagination and creativity expressed in such ways can be healthy, but never should we detour into the idea that those figments can possibly be better than what we have here and now.

In regard to Fiction VS Reality, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writes:

"Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable."