Humanity's Favourite Existential Coping Mechanism
The hidden agenda of every story you've ever loved
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought is asked to answer the Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything, and famously comes up with the answer “42”.
A quirky punchline, yes, but it points to a deeper truth: human beings are obsessed with finding meaning, especially the “meaning of life”, as the phrase goes.
This is the domain of the great philosophers: from Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates in the west, to Lao Tzu, Siddhartha Gautama and Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī in the east, the world’s greatest thinkers have pondered this question for a long time.
You might say we as a species have a vested interest in it.
In fact, the search for meaning is perhaps the single most important aspect of humanity that makes us… well, human. Cats and cows do not seem to care much about what comes tomorrow or next week, nor about what it all means. My cat certainly doesn’t—her life is one of lazing in the sun and lording it over us puny humans.
Alone among all the animals, humans constantly seek out this meaning, in almost anything we do. Our brains are wired to find patterns everywhere, and is able to reason about those patterns, and project them into the future.
This superpower, as you can imagine, has been both good and bad for humanity. On the one hand, being able to think about the future allows us to plan ahead, stock up for winter, plant trees the shade of which will benefit not us but our children and their children—all that good stuff. That is our blessing.
But all things must be balanced, so then there is also the curse: the eternal search for meaning in our lives, and the odd, nagging feeling that it is imperative that we discover it, and do it soon, otherwise we will be left out in the cold and dark and everything will be terrible forever.
The drama!
Existential angst plagues us, and (seemingly) us alone in all the animal kingdom. Perhaps not every single person (we all know a couple of happy-go-lucky people, those rare specimens that go through life unbothered and unflappable), and perhaps not at every hour of every day (there is indeed at least some rest for the wicked, much to their relief), but it’s there like an undercurrent beneath the day-to-day moments of each of our lives. Otherwise sane, stable and strong people are often reduced to cowering, crying messes in the moments before death, revealing not that they were somehow weak and insecure all along, but rather that the quest for meaning eventually breaks through even the most stalwart defences and demands satisfaction. Demands answers.
So how do we deal with this relentless angst, and with finding these elusive answers?
As a tool-making species, we come up with all sorts of psychological technologies to provide them, of course.
Some turn to philosophy. Others turn to religion.
But every single one of us, whether we realize it or not, turn to stories for these answers.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Okay, so with that bit of introductory philosophy out of the way, we can finally turn to today’s topic, which is fiction, and the way we use it to search for meaning in the world.
From Albert Camus and Victor Frankl to Fyodor Dostoevsky and Douglas Adams, a multitude of authors have by way of fiction explored (or at least touched upon) man’s search for significance in life. I’m here to argue that providing answers to the quest for meaning is pretty much the only purpose of fiction.
“But muh entertainment!”
Okay, yes, but hear me out: Eating food is pleasurable, right? Would you say that the pleasure is the only purpose of food? Of course not. Food is first and foremost nourishment, which is necessary to live. The pleasure of eating is secondary, and evolved in animals (including us) to encourage them/us to do more of the thing that is necessary for life.
So if we find consuming good fiction to be pleasurable (i.e. entertaining), it makes sense that there is some underlying reason for that, some inherent nourishment we receive from reading books and watching movies and listening to Grandpa tell a good yarn. There is something embedded in the very foundations of fictional stories that we need, and the entertainment value we receive is just our mind’s way of reeling us in with a pure dopamine lasso to make sure we stay invested, because in some way that’s not always clear, listening to stories is good for us.
Of course, entertainment matters. But fiction entertains us precisely because it’s feeding us something deeper.
That essential nourishment that stories provide is meaning: fictional stories allow us to follow a person (the protagonist) pursuing a meaningful goal (his desire), overcoming ever-growing obstacles from an implacable foe (the antagonist), at the risk of a precipitous downfall (i.e. enormous and ever-escalating stakes), all the way to a climactic final confrontation where a fragment of meaning lies in wait, ready to crystallise, as if by pure magic, in the mind of the audience.
These fragments of meaning are the whole purpose of fiction, and collecting them like Pokémon is the single most addictive-yet-non-destructive thing that humans can do. It’s one of the few positive addictions we experience: the more of these fragments we collect, the more we understand the world, and thus the better we become at navigating it—that is, as long as these messages are socially positive and constructive (which they normally are, but you do get the odd exception).
Nothing else even comes close.
And the funny thing is that this collection process happens whether we’re aware of it or not. Think you’re watching that Disney movie “just for fun”? Think bingeing the new season of your favourite show is “just for the entertainment”?
Think again.
Meaning and messaging are woven through every single piece of media you consume, and you are picking up those fragments whether you intend to or not. You literally can’t help yourself. Better to be aware of it so you can engage with those ideas and curate what you incorporate into your worldview instead of just passively drinking it all in.
Not only does the audience have no control over whether they will try to root out the meaning conveyed in a story, but even more interestingly, the author also has no real say in whether he or she will go about inserting meaning into a story. That, too, happens more or less automatically, and you cannot avoid it no matter how hard you try.
The drive for meaning is foundational to fiction. The mere impulse to write a story already contains within it the drive to share some sort of message. And no, that message is never simply “Here you go, be entertained!” That message always pertains to meaning—about life, about love, about relationships, about betrayal, about something crucial and important and integral to human existence.
The mere arrangement of a series of events to form a story will always contain some sort of message or opinion about some important aspect of life. Better to be aware of this and mould your story to convey the right message, one you actually believe in, than to just let the chips fall where they may and hope for the best. (And yes, it’s entirely possible to allow your story to say exactly the wrong thing, even exactly the opposite of what you believe to be true—trust me on this.)
All of which brings us to David Corbett’s The Art of Character, where the author does indeed deal with meaning in fiction.
All the way in chapter 17.
That’s not his fault. His book is about characters first and foremost, and he spends the early parts of the book exploring that.
But it’s in chapter 17 that he finally arrives at the purpose of even having characters in the first place: the protagonist acting as the messenger for that fragment of meaning.
The most fascinating part of all this? Sometimes the protagonist doesn’t even know what role he’s playing! He is the instrument by which the author shows off and highlights that crystal of meaning, but he himself isn’t necessarily privy to the message.
The scalpel has no need to understand the purpose of the surgery—it only needs to be sharp and clean, and thereby ready to serve the surgeon.
This dichotomy is one of the most interesting facets in the entire craft of writing (at least to me), and touches on probably the single most intriguing element of good fiction: knowledge gaps and the resulting subtext. But more on those in a later post.
Corbett argues that conveying your fragment of meaning effectively relies very much on a proper framing of the conflict at the heart of your story. That’s a whole other topic by itself, involving obstacles, antagonism, and stakes, and we’ll explore all those elements in future posts, but the most important thing is the end purpose of all this: defining and demonstrating a moral premise, which is the packaging for the fragment of meaning that the story delivers to the audience.
So, as a quick recap: the protagonist is the messenger—the driver of the vehicle—and in the trunk he’s got a package—the moral premise of the story—which he is looking to deliver to the audience.
The vehicle itself is, of course, the story’s plot, and this contains another important kernel of truth: the protagonist is the driver, meaning he needs to be steering the story at least to some degree. He cannot be entirely passive and still deliver the package (there are no self-driving cars in the world of fiction writing, sorry!). He needs to put his hands on the steering wheel at some point, or nothing will get delivered anywhere. Finally, the protagonist may or may not know what’s inside the package. Not knowing won’t prevent him from delivering the package.
Make sense? Great.
Note that this moral premise is not the same thing as a story’s theme, though novice writers often mistake them for each other. More on that when we delve into theme.
So here we’ve arrived at the crux of the matter, not just of this post but of fiction as a whole.
At its core, every story is delivering a message. The question is: Are you aware of what yours is saying?
So that’s it for today’s post! It’s a modest start to this Top 5 Takeaways series, but I hope you found the information here valuable. Even if I have managed merely to create an awareness relating to the messaging in media, that is enough.
For any aspiring writer, this awareness is the first step in what can be a long and productive path as an author of great fiction.
I hope you’ll join me on the journey, which is what The Hard Yards will be all about.
In this week’s supplemental (coming your way on Friday), we’ll be diving into an exercise that’ll give you X-ray vision to reveal the foundation of any story, and arm you with a strategy to identify any story’s moral premise in three practical steps. Once you know how to do this, you’ll start seeing these premises everywhere, and more importantly, you’ll have a massive head start on recognising and refining the fragments of meaning lurking in your own writing, and polishing them like gems for your audience to pick up and cherish.