We are starting today with a bit of a confession, and I think it is one that a lot of people in our circle are going to find uncomfortably relatable. Today's prompt from Daniel is about the slow, creeping death of the ability to enjoy fiction. He says he used to love stories, but lately, he finds himself hitting a wall of cognitive friction where everything feels too preposterous or just plain impossible. He is living on a steady diet of documentaries and deep dives into how things work, while his wife, Hannah, is holding down the fort for the imagination, arguing that fiction is actually a vital mental simulator. Daniel frames it as a loss. He feels like he has lost a superpower, or maybe he has just outgrown a childhood habit that he actually misses.
It resonates deeply in our current information climate. I am Herman Poppleberry, and I have spent the morning looking into the neurological basis for why this happens. It isn't just Daniel being cranky or losing his sense of wonder. There is a real psychological shift that happens when your brain becomes hyper-optimized for high-signal, high-utility information. When you spend your professional life in technology, communications, and automation like Daniel does, your brain develops a very low tolerance for logical inconsistencies. You start viewing a narrative not as an experience to be felt, but as a system to be debugged. We are talking about a fundamental shift in how the brain filters incoming data.
That is a sharp way to put it, Herman. If you spend all day looking for bugs in code or friction in a communication workflow, you cannot just flip a switch and ignore a gaping plot hole in a television show. It feels like a personal insult to your intelligence. It is like the writer is saying, I do not care enough about the rules of reality to make this make sense, so you should just deal with it. But I want to push back on the idea that this is just about being technical. Is it possible that we are actually losing a cognitive skill? Hannah's point about fiction being a mental simulator is actually backed by a lot of research. If Daniel cannot engage with that simulator, is he missing out on a specific type of mental exercise?
He really is. There is a concept called Narrative Transportation Theory, which was popularized by researchers like Melanie Green and Timothy Brock back in the year two thousand. They describe it as a distinct mental state where all of your capacities become focused on the events occurring in the narrative. When you are transported, you lose track of time, you stop noticing your physical surroundings, and, most importantly, you stop being critical. Your fact-checking brain goes into a low-power mode because the emotional engagement is taking up all the resources. The problem Daniel is describing is that his transportation mechanism is broken. He is standing on the platform, but the train never leaves the station because he is too busy pointing out that the tracks are the wrong gauge or that the conductor is wearing a hat from the wrong era.
So, why does the train stop leaving the station? Is it because the stories are getting worse, or because our preposterousness threshold has shifted? I feel like we live in an era where reality is already so strange and information is so accessible that the bar for what feels believable has moved. If I can go on Wikipedia and see the exact, messy, complicated truth of a historical event, a Hollywood dramatization of that same event feels like a cheap plastic toy. It is like we have been spoiled by the richness of reality, and fiction just feels thin by comparison.
That's where the friction starts. We have developed what I call the Non-Fiction Bias. In an information-dense environment, we are biologically wired to prioritize high-utility data. If I read a book about battery chemistry or the history of the Levant, I am gaining equity in my knowledge base. It feels productive, like I am building a toolkit for the real world. Fiction, to a brain that is always on and always looking for an edge, can feel like a wasted cycle. It feels like playing a video game where the progress does not save. But the brain does not actually distinguish between real and imagined experiences as clearly as we think. When you read a well-written scene about someone experiencing social rejection, your brain fires in the same regions as if you were experiencing it yourself. It is a form of neuroplastic training. By avoiding fiction, Daniel might be letting his empathy and social-modeling muscles atrophy.
But that training only works if you can actually get past the this is fake barrier. My tolerance for preposterousness is tied to internal consistency. I can handle dragons or faster-than-light travel if the rules of that world are rigid. What I cannot handle is when characters act in ways that defy human logic just to move the plot forward. That is the impossible part Daniel mentioned. It is not the setting that is the problem; it is the narrative shortcuts. It is when a character who is supposed to be a genius makes a bafflingly stupid decision just so the villain can escape. That is when I check out. It feels like the writer is cheating.
And those shortcuts are becoming more visible because of how we consume media now. We talked about this in episode twelve sixty-six, where we looked at the Algorithmic Gaze and how reality television is edited. We have been trained by algorithms to expect certain beats at certain times. When you see the seams of the production, the suspension of disbelief evaporates. For someone like Daniel, who understands automation and systems, those seams look like giant neon signs. You are not seeing a story; you are seeing a scriptwriter trying to hit a twenty-two-minute mark or a producer demanding a cliffhanger for the commercial break. The Algorithmic Gaze has made us all hyper-aware of the structure, and once you see the structure, it is very hard to feel the soul of the story.
Think of it like the difference between looking at a painting and looking at the brushstrokes. Once you start focusing on the technique and the limitations of the medium, the image disappears. But let us talk about the cost of this. If we all move toward this non-fiction only world, what happens to our ability to model what-if scenarios? Hannah argues that it expands the mind, and I think she is right. Fiction allows us to run edge-case simulations on the human condition that non-fiction simply cannot reach because non-fiction is tethered to what has already happened. Non-fiction tells us what is; fiction tells us what could be. If we lose the could be, do we lose our ability to innovate?
That's a significant point, Corn. Non-fiction is the study of the past and the present. Fiction is the laboratory of the possible. If you lose the ability to engage with fiction, you might be losing your ability to engage with speculative thinking. There is a technical mechanism here called the Collaborative Hallucination. We did a deep dive on this in episode eleven eighty-seven when we talked about puppetry and artificial intelligence. The idea is that for a puppet to work, the audience has to work just as hard as the puppeteer. You have to agree to see the wood and string as a living thing. If you refuse to collaborate, the magic dies. Daniel is essentially saying he has lost the will to collaborate with the storyteller. He is looking at the strings and saying, those are just strings, why are you pretending they are not?
Is that a failure of the reader or a failure of the writer? Because I think a lot of modern fiction is, frankly, lazy. It relies on tropes that have been deconstructed so many times that there is nothing left but the skeleton. When Daniel says things feel overdone, I think he is reacting to the fact that we have reached a point of narrative saturation. We have seen every hero's journey variant ten thousand times. Our pattern recognition software is so advanced now that we can predict the ending of a movie within the first ten minutes. It is not that we are losing our imagination; it is that the stories are not keeping up with our ability to decode them.
I agree with that. The surprise is gone because the data set is too large. But I would argue that the Wikipedia Effect is also playing a huge role here. We covered this in episode twelve ninety-eight, regarding who controls the digital truth. We have become a culture of fact-checkers. We watch a movie with a phone in our hand, ready to look up whether a certain type of plane actually existed in nineteen forty-two. That hyper-critical, verified truth mindset is the natural enemy of the poetic truth that fiction tries to convey. If you are looking for a technical error, you will find one. And once you find it, your brain uses it as an excuse to disengage. It is a defense mechanism against being lied to, but it also prevents us from being moved.
It is like we are suffering from an epistemic itch that we cannot stop scratching. We want everything to be true in a literal, verifiable sense. But the irony is that non-fiction is often just as constructed as fiction. This is what people call the Narrative Fallacy. Our brains are so desperate for story that we take random historical events and force them into a neat beginning, middle, and end. We turn real people into protagonists and antagonists even when the reality was just a messy series of bureaucratic errors or accidental coincidences. We are still consuming stories; we just feel better about it if the names are real.
That is such an important realization. The distinction between fiction and non-fiction is much blurrier than we admit. A documentary filmmaker is making thousands of choices about what to cut, what music to play, and which interview clips to use to create a specific emotional arc. They are writing a story using real footage. In a way, a non-fiction addict is still consuming fiction; they are just consuming fiction that uses the aesthetic of truth to bypass their critical filters. They are being manipulated just as much, but the label on the bottle says facts, so they swallow it without questioning the flavor.
So Daniel is essentially saying, I only like my stories if they pretend they are not stories. It is a matter of branding. If you label it A True Story, his brain says, okay, this is useful data, I will pay attention. If you label it A Novel, his brain says, this is a lie, why am I wasting my time? It is almost a form of cognitive elitism, where we value the fact over the meaning. But as you said, the meaning is where the growth happens. If we only value facts, we become encyclopedias, not people.
And that is dangerous because the meaning is often where the real growth happens. Think about hard science fiction. A writer like Greg Egan or Ted Chiang creates these wildly preposterous scenarios, but they use them to explore deep philosophical or mathematical concepts that you could not explain in a dry textbook. If you cannot get past the preposterous premise, you miss the profound insight. You are essentially refusing to use a tool because you do not like the color of the handle. You are missing out on a massive amount of intellectual heavy lifting because you are hung up on the delivery mechanism.
I think part of the struggle, though, is the sheer volume of junk fiction. The preposterousness threshold is hit much faster when the stakes feel artificial. If the world is ending for the fiftieth time this summer in a superhero movie, I do not care. My brain's danger sensor has been completely desensitized. But if I read a quiet, realistic story about a person losing their job or struggling with a difficult decision, that can feel incredibly true even if that person never existed. Maybe the problem isn't fiction; maybe the problem is the spectacle that fiction has become. We have traded emotional depth for visual noise, and brains like Daniel's are just exhausted by the noise.
That's a vital distinction. There is a difference between High-Fantasy Preposterousness and Emotional Preposterousness. I think Daniel might find his way back if he looked for fiction that has high internal consistency and low spectacle. We are talking about things like hard sci-fi or literary realism. If the characters' motivations are logically sound, your technical brain can relax and let the narrative transportation happen. You stop looking for the bug in the plot because the human logic is sound. You are not being asked to believe in magic; you are being asked to believe in people.
Let us talk about the Mental Simulator aspect for a second, because I think Hannah is really onto something there. There is research suggesting that reading fiction actually increases your capacity for empathy. By forcing yourself to occupy the headspace of someone who is not you, someone who might not even be real, you are exercising your theory of mind. If you only read non-fiction, you are mostly learning about things. When you read fiction, you are experiencing things. You are practicing the act of being human in a variety of different contexts.
You're right. There is a study by Keith Oatley, a cognitive psychologist, who found that people who read more fiction performed better on tests of empathy and social acumen than those who read mainly non-fiction. The theory is that fiction is a flight simulator for social life. In a non-fiction book, you get the what and the why. In fiction, you get the how it feels. For someone in technology and automation, those how it feels data points are actually incredibly valuable for understanding user behavior or team dynamics. It is not unproductive time; it is research and development for your social brain. It is the only way to test-drive an emotion without the real-world consequences.
So, if Daniel wants to fix his relationship with fiction, how does he do it? Because you cannot just force yourself to be interested in something that feels like a waste of time. I think we need a framework for the Non-Fiction Addict to transition back into the world of the impossible. We need a way to lower the cognitive load of suspension of disbelief.
I have a few thoughts on that. First, we have to acknowledge that Suspension of Disbelief is a cognitive load. It takes energy to ignore the preposterous. If you are tired or stressed, your brain is going to default to the path of least resistance, which is often a documentary where the information is served to you directly. To get back into fiction, you might need to treat it like a workout. You have to build up the imagination muscle again. You cannot start by running a marathon of high fantasy; you have to start with a light jog of grounded realism.
I like the Fifty Page Rule. This is something I have heard a lot of readers use. You give a book fifty pages to transport you. If the train hasn't left the station by page fifty, you are allowed to put it down. But you have to give those fifty pages your full, undivided attention. No phone, no fact-checking, no Wikipedia-ing the author. You have to commit to the Collaborative Hallucination for at least that long. You have to give the story a chance to build its own internal logic before you start tearing it down.
I would also suggest that Daniel looks for System-Heavy fiction. There is a whole genre of Hard Science Fiction where the author spends an enormous amount of time ensuring that the physics and the logic are as accurate as possible. Authors like Andy Weir or Neal Stephenson write stories that appeal to the technical brain. They give you enough real data to keep your critical mind occupied while they sneak the story in through the back door. It is like putting medicine in a dog's treat. You are satisfying the non-fiction itch while exercising the narrative brain. You are learning about orbital mechanics or cryptography while also following a character arc.
I see what you mean. Start with the stuff that feels close to reality. If you jump straight from a documentary on the Roman Empire to a high-fantasy novel about elves, the preposterousness gap is too wide. You need a bridge. Historical fiction can be that bridge. You get the utility of learning about a real time period, but you get the simulation of living through a character's eyes. You are getting the facts and the feelings at the same time. It is a hybrid model that might be more palatable for a skeptical brain.
Another takeaway is to reframe unproductive time. We are so obsessed with optimization and learning how the world works that we forget that we are part of how the world works. Our emotions, our irrationalities, our dreams—those are real data points too. If you only study the hard sciences and the hard facts, you are missing half of the map. Fiction is the map of the soft world, the world of human experience. It is the only way to explore the internal landscape with any degree of accuracy.
It is about cognitive flexibility. A brain that can only process facts is a brittle brain. It is good at solving known problems, but it is bad at imagining new ones. If you want to be a great prompter, a great developer, or a great communicator, you need to be able to ask What if? and then live in that What if? for a while without constantly checking the exits. You need to be able to inhabit a world that doesn't exist yet so that you can help build it.
I think we are also seeing a shift in how stories are told that might help people like Daniel. We are moving toward more interactive and emergent storytelling. In video games or immersive experiences, the preposterousness is mitigated by the fact that you are an active participant. You aren't just watching a transparently impossible plot; you are navigating it. Your agency creates its own logic. If you make a choice, the outcome feels earned, even if the setting is fantastical. The interaction provides the grounding that the passive narrative lacks.
That is interesting. Maybe the future of fiction for the skeptical brain is not a book or a movie, but a simulation where the rules are consistent and the outcomes are not predetermined. But even then, you still have to agree to be there. You still have to play the game. You still have to accept the initial premise, no matter how wild it is.
And that is the challenge. Can you let go of the need for The Truth for long enough to find A Truth? Because that is what Hannah is arguing. The reality beyond the one we experience isn't a lie; it is an expansion. It is like adding a new dimension to a graph. Suddenly, the points that didn't make sense in two dimensions start to form a clear pattern in three. Fiction provides that third dimension. It gives context to the facts.
I like that perspective. It is not about escaping reality; it is about augmenting it. If we only look at what is, we are stuck. If we look at what could be, we are growing. I think Daniel's dark confession is actually a sign that he is ready for a new kind of challenge. He has mastered the what, and now he is bumping up against the limits of it. He is ready for the next level of complexity, which is the messy, subjective, beautiful world of the imagined.
Well, Daniel, if you are listening, here is your homework. Pick one work of fiction—maybe something in that hard sci-fi or historical realism vein—and give it the full Fifty Page Rule treatment. No phones, no Googling, just you and the Collaborative Hallucination. See if you can find the poetic truth behind the preposterous surface. Try to see the puppet as a living thing, just for an hour.
And Hannah, keep fighting the good fight. Every truth-seeking brain needs an imagination-expanding partner to keep it from becoming too brittle. It is that dynamic that keeps the world interesting. It is the tension between the anchor and the sail. You need both to get anywhere.
It really does. And look, if you find yourself struggling with this too, you are not alone. We live in a world that values the fact above almost everything else. We are bombarded with data, and we have been taught that data is the only thing that matters. But remember that the most important facts in human history—things like justice, or rights, or even the concept of a corporation—started as preposterous fictions that enough people agreed to believe in. We live in a world built by the imagination.
That is a deep one to end on. The world we live in is built on the fictions of the past. If we stop imagining new ones, we stop building the future. We just become curators of a museum that is slowly running out of space.
This has been a compelling dive. I think it is a topic we will probably come back to as the line between A-I-generated reality and human fiction continues to blur. In a world where an artificial intelligence can generate a perfectly realistic video of something that never happened, our ability to distinguish between fact and fiction is going to be tested like never before. We might need fiction more than ever just to help us navigate the lies of the future.
I might join you in that homework, Herman. Maybe something with a very logically consistent magic system. Something that challenges my brain but respects my intelligence.
That is the spirit. There is a lot of great stuff out there if you know where to look.
Thanks as always to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping the gears turning behind the scenes. And a big thanks to Modal for providing the G-P-U credits that power the generation of this show. If you are enjoying these deep dives into the weird friction of modern life, a quick review on your favorite podcast app really helps us reach more truth-seeking brains like Daniel.
You can also find our full archive and all the ways to subscribe at myweirdprompts dot com. We have been Corn and Herman Poppleberry.
This has been My Weird Prompts. We will see you next time.
Take care everyone.
