Fictional Stories of Belief – Thoughts from July 25, 2022

I had a thought as I was driving to work, and I sent myself a note about it. I will now expound upon it in the storage locker of my thoughts. It continues my previous musing about telling your story. Your beliefs are not part of your story so you should not include them when you’re telling your story. Your actions and experiences apply to your story, but your beliefs don’t. The beliefs may have led to your actions, but your beliefs come from other people. As much as it pains me to say it, your thoughts are also not part of your story. You can use your thoughts to comment on your story, but they are not actually your story. If you believe something destined an event to happen, you are telling the readers how to interpret your story. Our stories are the accumulations of our experiences. If your story relies too much on what you believe happened, you might as well call it fictional.

If you call your story a fictional autobiography, you can include as many of your beliefs as you want. I won’t read it, but you would at least be labeling it correctly. I have listened to many autobiographies that lose me when they start talking about their beliefs. Stories get ruined when you explain your beliefs as part of it. If nothing else, it’s bad storytelling. A joke that has to be explained is not a good joke. I might actually do a fictional autobiography to tell the “what if” scenarios of my life. What if I became a rock star? How about if I became an animator at Disney? What if I was still working in the Data Entry department? This would be the nightmare version of my life I don’t want to think about. No matter what happens in this alternate timeline, I would not be the person I am today. I have perfected the art of living. I would not have done that in any other timeline.

The perfected art of living I mentioned in the last paragraph does not mean that my life is perfect. Understanding life and dealing with it are two different things. I know how to live a happy and healthy life, but I still have to deal with other people who do not. I can deal with reality, but I have a hard time with others who don’t accept it. This doesn’t mean I hate other people, but people still hate me. I don’t believe in anything, but others love their lives based only on their beliefs. I know life is complex and I will only understand a small part of it. Other people accept simple answers that don’t allow them to actually understand themselves or life.

I could easily see someone reading this Thoughts paper on its own and thinking I’m fooling myself about how I handle life. I act as if reality isn’t something I have a hard time dealing with. This is far from true. As a thought experiment (my favorite kind), I would ask this fictional person (perhaps you) to think about what you notice throughout your day. What noises or conversations do you hear? What things do you see? Are your senses always on high alert? Can you ignore the world around you? Distracting yourself is one way to ignore the world, but it doesn’t work in this thought experiment world. I’m forcing you to notice everything around you. Your thoughts only remind you how inescapable the realities of life are. What others ignore, you experience all at once and nonstop. You can only answer why something happened in real terms. Metaphors are inadequate to explain reality. I accept reality because I don’t have another choice.

Reality is not funny on its own, but those who ignore or deny it are. Seeing people deal with reality while denying it is funny from the outside, but sad from the inside. Reality doesn’t try to fool you, but people do. They distract you from the realities in your life. Beliefs only come from other people. Some realities can distract you from other ones, but only beliefs can distract you from all realities.