Stories of the Mind

The world needs stories for a simple reason. Stories define us. Forget about the books you read or the movies you watch. Those aren’t the important stories. The important ones are the tales that never see the light of day. These stories exist only in the minds of every person everywhere, shaping our lives.

I’m going to throw out a statistic here that I made up on the spot and is probably wrong. 99.9% of all stories will never been seen or heard by anyone other then the storyteller.. They’re the stories we tell ourselves, the fantasies we concoct when bored or the dreams we have in that awesome moment of sleep where we can kind of control what’s going on. They’re the lies we imagine about ourselves and others in order to stay sane. No one will ever hear them, no one will ever know them, but they are stories essential to the well-being of the mind.

Stories are how we sort through our problems. When something goes wrong, this is how we cope. We make stories about difficult situations and potential resolutions. The point of these stories isn’t to find an actual solution, but to explore every possibility, and maybe relive some of the best ones, in order to get rid of the dredge so your problems don’t effect the rest of your life.

The world doesn’t need stories as much as the individual needs stories. We need the narrative in our lives in order to get our way through the boring parts and relive the great parts. Unlike real life, stories almost always have happy endings. Even the ones that don’t end happily at least make sense and end with a purpose. Isn’t that something we all strive for in our own personal story?

In his pretend life, August Baker is a retail monkey who channels anger and loathing into something vaguely resembling literature. In his real life, he is a Space Pirate.

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