Everyone devours that which they enjoy. Whether you intend to or not, you will consume and tear apart the things you love the most, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Ok, with that ominous sounding intro out of the way, that's get into what I mean by that.
Your brain is constantly consuming information. What you like, what you dislike, what experiences you have with people you love, whether they could have been better, and what experiences do we hate? We do this with storytelling, too. Why do you think do many, if not all of your industries revolve around stary? There's the obvious ones, Movies, TV, Books, And Video Games, but everything? Yes. Most products have some sort of story they try to sell you on about some need they've figured out how to fulfill, some journey someone went on to discover that their purpose was to make this thing. Hero's journeys. They're everywhere! And that's not a bad thing. It's a very human thing. It's how we interpret the world around us, and make sense of the nonsense.
But it also means we're taking apart the world around us in order to understand it.
How could you not? Look at the vastness of everything around you. All the decisions you need to make in a single day, in a month, in a year, in deciding what to do with your life. Everything would be too overwhelming otherwise. We'd all be puddles of goo on the floor if we could take it all at once. So, we don't. We make sense of the chaos bit by bit, piece by piece, becoming ever better, as we recede to the line of sanity.
We do this most with things we love.
How many times do we rewatch something to better understand it? How many times to we show a friend, so that they can experience it too, and maybe they'll notice something we missed? How many times do we replay a memory in our mind, over and over. Picking apart everything in our lives. Trying to see if our social performance was perfect, see if there was anywhere we messed up or caused offence. How many times to we revisit the look on a loved one's face when we gained their approval?
5? 10? 100? Do we even remember?
This isn't a bad thing. This is a human thing. It's how we make sense of the madness.
And it relates to how we make art. I'll touch on that in the next article.
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