In high school I transitioned from reading a lot of fantasy/adventure to reading nonfiction, like “The Selfish Gene”, “Mutants”, “The Checklist Manifesto”, etc. I remember it was hard – it turned out that I had unconsciously developed the habit of skim-reading, because fantasy/adventure novels tend to have a lot of descriptions that can evoke mental imagery without careful reading. This did not work for the nonfiction I read. I’d go through the motions of reading several pages and not absorb anything I read. I slowly unlearned this habit by keeping a piece of computer paper folded up into quarters as a bookmark, and taking notes to make sure I was comprehending and not forget the interesting bits. I’d conveniently have all the things I found noteworthy on a sheet/sheets of paper to review at the end.
It worked well enough, to the point that I started feeling that nonfiction books were superior to fiction because they were more easily embedded – when you finish a fictional novel/series, it is done, complete. But after finishing a nonfiction book, it was not uncommon to find it referenced in another book, or find that its ideas would concretely affect how you thought about things.
Then, it is a few years after college and I am having fun learning things that I find interesting, in a different country, and getting paid for it. Then I notice a strange coincidence: my young adult life so far looks like a modern-day parallel of a typical fantasy/adventure story – a young person backpacks far and wide, sometimes with friends along the way (in this very modern story, I can take my close friends with me because we hang out virtually), and finds the wizard to apprentice themself to, learns magic, traveling far, traveling light. And when things seem uncertain and intimidating, I think of how challenges are essential in making a story interesting. “Things will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
Stepping back, it is rather tickling to realize there is the potential framing of this as an underdog story, where the humble, frivolous story has a higher level impact on the seemingly more virtuous/practical fact-based/objective nonfiction books. It dictates the story, the overall arc, of your life. I suppose a similar effect may be achieved with biographies. But for some reason I’ve only started reading them more recently. (Also real life role models, but I didn’t have any). But I think the critical bit is that it’s hard to grow in a cohesive direction unless you aspire to a platonic ideal of yourself – but you first need to develop a platonic ideal of yourself (I took this phrase from a twitter post).
I wonder if that’s related to the problem that’s pervasive among the kids today. I’d think that ordinarily, it’s only critical to do an exploration of narratives/lifestyles if you’re going to deviate from the norm. But now, the default paths have dried up, and many have not explored a wide enough range of narratives to cultivate a deep taste in who they want to be.
And I wonder if this relates to depressive nihilism, where my speculated preventative against depressive nihilism is being aware of the things that matter to you. Because even if you think objectively that nothing matters in the end, you feel that things matter to you. And I suspect that’s real enough to live a life out on.
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