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Love Fictionally: Dogma Displacing Discovery

While seated at my gate at San Francisco International Airport, I couldn't possibly help but overhear the young lady seated beside me:

“I want to be in a relationship, but I don’t know how to be in one. Is this how love feels? I’m just like, when I look at him, I don’t feel anything, and I feel like [sic] the more time I spend with him, the more I’ll dislike him.” 

This aligns rather interestingly with an alarming monologue overheard months ago at my local Safeway grocery store: "Are my expectations too high? Perhaps I'm watching too much This is Us."

The growing accessibility of theater and technology appears to come with a tremendous downside, which has unfolded before our eyes in real time: today's human being is left to decipher between the beginnings and ends of theater and those of real life.

All too often, the two appear to be conjoined, even indistinguishable.

And where theater once existed as either comic relief or an artistic expression of patches of life, people today flock to patch their own lives in accordance with the fashionable on-screen trends and archetypes of the day.

So no longer does theater emulate life, but the latter appears to emulate the former.

What's more, the greater distinction here appears to be the way that theater is consumed and the way that it is interpreted relative to our personal affairs.

In most cases, the fictionalizations are best left at the box office on the way out, discarded for the drivel that they represent.

Instead, the average observer is inclined to warp his or her reality around the compelling choreography, as it naturally bears a strikingly relatable semblance to that reality.

So most of the human population will forever avoid living in that cell of solitude, opting instead to navigate the roads of life on ready-made conclusions and frameworks of untested, parroted designs.

For this very reason, the young lady seated next to me solicits her friend's advice on her love affairs, to establish an understanding of normalcy, instead of discovering what is important to her.

Ladies and gentlemen, above all else, love yourself and strive to become completely satisfied alone before entering a relationship; it renders that worthwhile one more apparent and sustainable.

Unfortunately, mainstream melodramas and romantic comedies have left generations of individuals delusional about the concept of love, and girls such as this one will await their knights in shining armor instead of seizing the opportunity to discover themselves, to treasure their solitude, and to define their lives by events and meaningful exercises within the scope of their own independent control.

All too often, mystery appears to take hold of the earth’s human inhabitants, dazzling them with the prospects of what might underly the perplexing countenance of their counterparts. After all, it is the very sophistication of human imagination which separates the species from its intellectually-inferior counterparts.

Here it appears, however, that this level of sophistication is precisely responsible for the species’ own intellectual demise in a sort of Laffer-style departure from objectivity.

So along that curve of enlightenment, the intellectual exposes herself to fellow articulate interpreters who perpetuate relatively common or relatable inferences rooted purely in familiar conjecture that gains sufficient popular support, or literary cogency, to merit the highest rank of authenticity: academic review, widespread publication or dissemination across classroom curricula.

And as the reader becomes increasingly well-read, she must simultaneously distill the deluge of data and information to form a sound and cohesive understanding of the material.

Unfortunately, just as imprinting proves unshakably persuasive during the early stages of mental development, the reader’s enlightenment follows a similar path, with the foremost experiences bearing irrepressible weight on the intellectual’s final disposition.

It is thus here that the individual often commits the error of supplementing the void of mystery, or continuing the fiction-fueled interpretation, with fanciful or fateful fantasies of grandeur, oftentimes perniciously guided by storylines etched into her mind by crafty penmen and producers whose aesthetically-pleasing designs bolster the preferred tale or otherwise wholly displace the sobering disappointment which remains despite the observer’s voluntary or automatic rejection of it.

Ultimately, if there is an objective reality, it exists independent of anyone’s feelings, interpretations or any arsenal of adjectives available to describe it.

All too often, however, producers are inclined, even encouraged, to dress it up instead of simply sharing it.

And so it goes, a perpetual delusion beating ceaselessly down upon a dwindling and discouraged minority of truth seekers and dislikable foes who resist the fashionable fiction.

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