142. THE INEVITABILITY OF FANTASY - Leaning Into Storytelling In Lieu of Truth
The human mind creates constructed realities.
The more depressed you are the more accurately you see the world.
The aim therefore isn’t for truth, but for fiction
That allows us to live in peace.
Our minds carefully construct beautiful fantasies to save us from the awful truth
And philosophers - supposedly smart people - destroy those fantasies with the blunt force of logic
And then wonder why their wisdom didn’t leave them happy?
We are not creatures designed for truth
We are creatures designed to share stories and make believe.
We are dreamers, who unravel each day’s events only under cover of darkness and in a cloak of the unreal,
Who cannot confront the specifics,
And circle round the subject with therapists.
Even our best science begins as impossible speculation
and must be applied to fantasies made tangible and deemed as technological ‘progress’
For us to care.
Empirical observations that don’t contribute to the storytelling and shape the world to our desires
Either explain phenomena that didn’t need to be explained, or unpick the stories that were keeping us sane.
The same way we pick at scabs.
The smartest people take the blue pill
And stay in Plato’s cave
They make peace with Descartes’ demon
And lean into the simulation
Writing their own existential stories
And avoiding the bad faith endeavour
Of trying to figure things out
And learn what we really are.
There is no world as it is
There is only the world as it is to you.
And together we negotiate
A mutually agreed story
that makes the world
The best it can be for all of us.
As best we can imagine it to be.
Knowing no one person has the privilege
Of having all the answers
But we all can share our stories.
For the only answer is that we don’t know,
And that we don’t need to know;
That we haven’t got the tools to know.
Only to create.
And keep on creating
New stories until we are finally able
To drift off into a comfortable sleep.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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