Derek Sivers has a good post about a Kurt Vonnegut talk he saw a couple years ago where Vonnegut described our desire for drama. He used a chart to graph the plot of a normal work of fiction and then graphed what normal people’s lives look like. Makes sense to me.
The normal disaster story, what we want our lives to be like.
“But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.â€
I refused to allow my children to watch soap operas for this exact reason. It seems to have worked – I have the least ‘drama queenie’ teenage girls of their peer group. Life is really quite dull. I wish mine were duller. I’m working on it.
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