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!

We have to.

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.

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.

They create and release tension, like a joke, which creates a pleasure burst greater than the discomfort of the tension.

Starting from basically birth, we learn. Learning is the process of creating models in our heads of corresponding causes and effects. This is what makes intelligence powerful. You can know, to a point, what is going to happen before it does. However, the causes in reality are complex and not always perceivable. When this happens, we experience emotional discomfort, the fear of the unpredictable. In stories, there is nothing but the story, so everything is built to create and then satisfy that sense of tension. This is the pleasure of learning.

Anecdotal, but I actually stopped liking fictional stories at some point, because I realized there’s such an abundance of cool and real stories I could be learning about, that it’s just like “Why are you telling me of a phoenix/dragon/Lavados when there’s black hawks setting fire to Australia?”.

I guess, it also ties in, though, that I don’t do escapism in general either, so I don’t either get lost in real stories, nor drugs.
I had a rough point in my life where escapism was crucial – I certainly don’t judge anyone wanting to step outside of this world for some time – but yeah, that changed my fundamental world view, so that I prefer to stay in the real world now.

Stories are the medium through which we understand the world.

They’re fun lol. Shit gets boring sometimes.