On Profits Of Stories

There is much possible profit that a person can obtain from creating or consuming stories.  Stories can establish or preserve a sense of identity, grapple with powerful concepts, and reveal us to ourselves in ways we might otherwise overlook.  The fact that Jesus used stories regularly to communicate spiritual and ethical truths should not be quickly dismissed by Christians.  Entertainment can be used for escapism, but escape is far from the only use of entertainment (and not even entertainment can allow a total escape from reality [1]).

One profit of stories is the ability to place oneself on a mental level in a different context.  Entertainment can give us a chance to have experiences of sorts that we otherwise would not have (and in some cases could not have).  I am not living in the first century AD, yet I can watch or read attempts to portray what it was like to live at that time.  I can in a muted way experience the brutality of wars that elapsed before I was born.  I can visit nonexistent realms and see fictional realizations of worlds that, though logically possible, were never actualized by God or by human behavior.  I can, as a result of stories, come to appreciate both history and pure fiction for the way that they can illuminate ideas and enable me to indirectly live as another person.

Yet stories in entertainment can also give us characters that we can relate to precisely because of some similarities in our experiences.  At its most personally powerful this can result in moments of deep introspection or catharsis.  For instance, when I first saw the movie Logan, I was starting to emerge from a period of deep existential depression.  During the preceding months, I had confronted theistic absurdism and my epistemic limitations in a way that made me unsure if I wanted to live or die.  I was desperate to know of any objective meaning that exists, and yet entirely unwilling to believe in the unproven and in doing so substitute knowledge for assumptions.

Because of the long months of suffering I had just endured, and because of my struggle with the consideration of suicide, I could relate to the depiction of Wolverine in the film--a character so pained by loss that he thinks about killing himself.  I could deeply connect with the fierce yet exhausted way that he lived because of my then-recent emotional agony.  I was intensely frustrated with the stupidity and shallowness of people around me and, though I so thoroughly wanted to find objective meaning, I had indeed given serious thought to killing myself.  The character of Logan was one I could identify with in part because of my experiences.

In other cases, I might feel connected with a character at a specific moment, as opposed to all throughout a story.  Sometimes it might be very difficult to articulate this sense of identifying with a fictional being, yet this does not cheapen the direct experience in any way.  An inability to articulate something does not necessarily weaken the impact of the concept or experience.  Sometimes this can even amplify the personal impact.  Entertainment can provide stimuli for deep journeys of the intellect and the emotions, and this quality of story is something far from irrelevant to the pursuit of truth.  Even self-revelation unveils a part of reality.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/02/escapism-never-full-escape.html