Stories

‘Anything in excess is dangerous’ is something they keep telling us as we grow up. We are stopped from munching on our favorite candies when we are kids and are stopped from enjoying our favorites drink when we are no more kids. The logic is simple. Anything in excess can lead to addiction and addictions can pretty much mess up the way our brains are wired, to put it crudely. But there is something that we keep consuming in excess without anyone bothering to stop us from doing that. And that damned thing is everywhere. I’m talking about stories. From the time we begin to grasp another person’s speech as kids to the end of our lives, we are told stories aplenty.

Stories are like sugar cubes. There are just so many of them we consume without realizing what they do to our brains. They look innocuous and most of the times enticing but they screw our realities in more ways than one. We begin to understand our realities as a part of some story, a story that we might have recently read or seen and the one in which found few elements of our lives sprinkled around. Even worse, we begin to see the lives of others as stories.

But stories around us, in those novels and movies, are essentially products or, worse, even commodities with endings written to make them sellable or make the readers emote in a certain way the author wants. Our lives, on the other hand, are results of decisions that we take on a day to day basis. However, sometimes we tend to let stories in more than required in our lives and make crucial life decisions that might make for a ‘good story’. The most dangerous bit is that, just like other addictions, our affinity for beautifully weaved stories reaches a point where we don’t realize how seamlessly we allow those stories to become a part of our lives. They begin to influence decisions they have no business doing. They begin to make us conjure up dreams that are clearly not an extension of our lived lives but are scenes borrowed from some story writer’s imaginations. The way I look at it, like the strongest of drugs, stories also destroy our perception of reality. As revolting as the analogy between something we are consuming since we were kids and drugs might seem, it is also true that we are perpetually high on stories. Our visions of future or a perfect life are massively influenced by stories we read and watch. They probably are even more dangerous than those drugs made illegal across the world for the escape they provide from reality isn’t always temporary. They’re powerful in their own way because they’ve the ability to permeate into our realities without us realizing. And they stay and keep manifesting in our actions. Yet, there is no one banning them. In fact, they are considered the lifeblood of existence, for what are lives without escapes that are more beautiful than our realities? And that’s why everything is packaged as a story today because a story, if told well, always sells.

I am not, for once, trying to assert that stories are harmful but they definitely are immensely powerful. Decisions influenced by the make believe world of stories don’t always lead to the endings of that make believe world. Futures that are seen through the tinted glasses of stories don’t always pan out that way. What most of us are left to contend with is a reality that is often less exciting, slighlty predictable and minus the twists and turns of a story that can fill the pages of a book or be the script of a movie. And when the lofty expectations of those story fuelled imaginations aren’t met, the return to sobriety isn’t the most pleasant of experience as we are left feeling miserable about our existence.