Follow this rabbit hole.
I have a theory that everything in life is fiction.
And here’s a short list of thoughts on that.
- That’s why storytelling and psychoanalysis are so powerful; we look for narratives that make us feel better.
- Defining yourself is fiction; it’s thinking of yourself from one perspective or another.
- Success is a fiction.
- An idea is fiction that becomes a vision if many people buy and buy into it.
- Getting a job depends on the HR person buying your definition of yourself during the interview, aka the story you tell them.
- We chase dreams that are fiction until they materialize. And then we look for a new plan, another new novel to pursue.
- Hope is a fiction. You need to tell yourself things that haven’t happened yet but that you imagine you’ll be better off with to motivate you to keep going.
- Anguish is a fiction you make up about something that hasn’t happened but could happen.
- Romantic love is born from the idealization of a person and the projection of the expected future, which is fiction.
- Victimhood is a fiction of something with which we suggest ourselves to gain understanding, empathy, and affection from others.
- The assumptions we make about things and people are fictions with which our mind fills in the gaps of things it does not know about a particular person or event.
- The expectations we mentally form about things rarely match reality by excess or defect, so they are fiction.
- Visualizing is a projected fiction.
- When fictions are not coherent with the future, they are called
scams. - When fiction is aimed at avoiding responsibility, we call them lies.
- When a country or a society or a culture (which are also fictions agreed upon between groups of people) tells you what you have to think, it mutilates your imagination muscle. It is a bitch because to achieve something, you first have to imagine how to achieve it. Ergo, you can’t be happy if you cannot imagine yourself in a happy future (which is fiction in your mind until it happens).
After these thoughts, let me delve a little deeper into my theory.
The past is fiction
They say every cell in your body is replaced between 7 and 10 years.
Therefore, you are not physically the same person you were ten years ago. Only your memories remain.
And your memories are subjective.
What happened ten years ago happened to a version of yourself that you are no longer and doesn’t even exist cellularly.
You can only remember the past from the point of view of the person you have become. Therefore, your vision of what happened can be as different as reading The Little Prince when you were eight and reading it when you were 40.
The information we consume modifies our relationship with our memories. — It is not the same remembering childhood after studying Dr. Freud 🙂
Just as you change, society changes, and so does the moral evaluation of what happened. (The victors, not the vanquished, write history; don’t forget that).
And this leads me to the conclusion that if the past is fiction, fiction can be past.
Fiction can be the past.
This means that characters in literature have touched the collective unconscious so profoundly that they are as real as those real people who existed.
For me, Sherlock Holmes is as real as Marcus Aurelius 🙂
People cease to exist if you stop remembering them. And therefore, Sherlock Holmes is much more accurate than your great-great-grandfather, whom you never met, and no one in your family remembers.
Reflecting on the above, I ask myself, “What differentiates my past from a dream?”
It scares and chills me to discover that my past and dreams are fragmented memories hidden in my brain and that, if I live long enough, they will be lost due to degenerative memory diseases like Alzheimer’s.
That may be why the ego is so resistant to change.
The ego is a fiction that wants to survive.
Because its function is for the current self to survive, not the future self, which in turn will have another ego different from the previous version of ourselves that we are today.
And that is why detachment is so necessary.
A cell that refuses to die becomes cancer.
A memory that refuses to die and tries to exist beyond memory can also intoxicate your life.
It’s like those people who pretend to be 20 forever; their psyche ends badly, and their life ends badly.
Conclusion
That is why everything we tell ourselves about our past or our future (which is fiction) — our narratives — is so important.
So my advice is to tell yourself the story as it best suits you to evolve. I am referring to the subjective level of your past and what you believe will happen.
Life is a dream, and dreams are dreams, said the writer Calderón de la Barca. And I think he was right, so be positive and tell yourself beautiful stories so you don’t turn your dream into a nightmare.
A virtual hug
AG
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