I don’t have any particularly rigorous thing to support this with, nor do I really think that there’s even any objective truth of the matter to be had about this, but… I just want to note that whenever people talk about cutting out all fiction, it strikes me as Deeply Wrong, the same way it might if someone said they were considering cutting out all friendship from their life. My aesthetic says that fiction is one of those things that makes life worth living in the first place, and that cutting it out makes one’s life worse.
… that said, I recognize that this is just my aesthetic and that other people have different ones, but I felt compelled to push back a little anyway.
So, first of all, like Peter says, I’m not advocating a permanent ban, but a temporary reprieve, for several reasons. I think it’s common to have a lot of addictive and escapist behaviors around fiction (in a way that I think is less common with friendships). I think people are basically on board with this idea as it applies to TV and video games but I would extend it to books as well. My addictive and escapist behaviors over the last 5 years were pretty evenly distributed between video games, anime, manga, and fantasy / sci-fi novels. (And this wasn’t true when I was in college; it all started when I entered grad school and became a lot more socially isolated.)
(It irks me the way e.g. Tumblr has built up this whole memeplex around reading being this wholesome pure thing when it feels to me only slightly less bad than other forms of fictional escapism. People used to worry in the old days about people reading too many novels or comics and I think we should update at least slightly in their direction.)
(The goal of this is not to produce shame in anyone who engages in a lot of fictional escapism; I don’t want to deny anyone their useful and important coping behaviors. This is for anyone who engages in a lot of fictional escapism and doesn’t know it.)
More broadly, I worry about fiction as a source of bad training data; it is not reality, it systematically differs from reality in many ways, and I think people who grew up absorbing a lot of fiction generally get screwed by it in subtle ways (for example, I’ve been posting on Facebook recently about ways in which I feel like my approaches to romantic relationships were screwed up by the TV and movies I watched growing up).
I also worry about fiction as pica, also like Peter says. A friend of mine recently told me about how he watched Avatar: The Last Airbender explicitly at a point in his life where he had no friends, so the characters were his friends instead. Giving up fiction can bring things like this into stark relief; if you notice that when you give up fiction all you do is stare blankly at the walls of your room because your life doesn’t put you into regular contact with other humans by default, that’s a valuable thing you’ve learned about your life / a valuable opportunity to confront the thing if you knew about it already but had been avoiding thinking about it.
A particular kind of fiction-as-pica that I don’t think people talk about enough is using video games as pica for personal growth / skill development (the only piece I’ve seen come close is Pixel Poppers on Fake Achievement, which is what first opened my eyes to this sort of thing). I notice that a lot of enjoyment I get out of playing, say, RPGs is enjoying the experience of my characters getting stronger and more capable of handling the challenges of the game. This is entirely pica; what I actually want is for me to get stronger, not my Pokemon.
I agree that all of the things that you listed can be issues, and if the two of you are just advocating a temporary break in order to recalibrate, then I don’t have an objection. I feel like I’ve seen sentiments in the rationalsphere that weren’t just about taking a temporary break but actually seriously recommending giving up all fiction for good, and I might have been responding more to my recollection of those sentiments than what you were actually saying.
On the thing about fiction as a source of bad training data specifically: agree that this can be an issue, especially if one has a very one-sided diet of fiction. There’s a lot of fiction out there that conveys outright toxic thought patterns and expectations about relationships. (One of my abhorrences is the whole “you get married and then you live happily ever after” trope and stuff related to it, which I suspect does damage in more subtle ways than just the obvious one.)
But at the same time, I would feel that the training data available to someone who didn’t consume much fiction, was also much impoverished compared to someone who consumed a varied diet of quality fiction. Any single person’s life can only provide them with direct experiences of a very small slice of all the possible human experiences and perspectives; somebody who supplemented their ordinary life with fiction could experience a vastly larger amount of them. Yes, those experiences are fictional, but good authors will draw on enough of their own actual life experience—as well as on actual background research—to make their fiction feel plausible and real. And if you are, say, reading an author from a different culture than your own, their own cultural perspective and assumptions will inevitably color the work and give you a taste of entirely different (real) perspectives and underlying assumptions. For example, this was an interesting comment that I happened to read recently:
Personally, I find that a focus on subverting norms of gender, race, and power hierarchies is the surest sign that a fictional work is thoroughly suffused with contemporary Western culture.
Part of it is that I read a lot of Korean and Japanese stuff. Their fiction, and their societies, are generally a lot less concerned with such things. Sometimes horribly so, to be honest (some Japanese fantasy works have a disturbing fascination with slavery).
(The work you consume doesn’t need to be geographically remote, either—if you take novels from even a century or two back, they’re already starting to be more delightfully alien than anything that an average science fiction or fantasy novel is capable of presenting.)
I don’t really find very compelling the psychological studies claiming that literary fiction can boost one’s ability for taking different kinds of perspectives—they suffer from all the standard cautions and caveats of psychological research, plus it’s a proposition that’s difficult to test experimentally—but I would be surprised if that claim wasn’t actually true. One definition of empathy says that it’s about the ability to put yourself in someone else’s head, and good fiction is about exactly that.
I agree that it’s possible to consume fiction in a much healthier, mind-expanding, empathy-increasing way than what I described. We can make a pretty strong analogy with food: many people consume junk food, junk food is plausibly somewhere between pretty bad and extremely bad for you, and taking a break from food (that is, fasting) can be a way to recalibrate yourself and get better attuned to the difference between good and bad food, none of which is to say that we should live our lives entirely without food. Similarly for “junk fiction.”
A particular kind of fiction-as-pica that I don’t think people talk about enough is using video games as pica for personal growth / skill development.
FWIW, I have definitely noticed that in times of my life where I’ve felt that I haven’t achieved much, I’ve been really drawn to watching sports anime where the characters get better/overcome stuff/etc. I think this is a combination of pica and reminding myself what I want out of life.
For the record, even though I’m giving up fiction for Rationalist Lent, I would pretty much agree with that. I intend to use it as an opportunity to break what I consider to be bad habits around it and reevaluate its place in my life, not as a prelude to a permanent ban.
I chose to give up fiction for Rationalist Lent (before reading the comments and before seeing this exchange).
I’ve been observing my fiction (particularly sci-fi) habits for the past year or so, and have tried to reduce/improve them, including making it a major focus both times I attended a CFAR workshop. This has been only marginally successful. The behavior feels addictive in both the sense that I lose sleep or forget other important things due to it, and in the sense that it’s hard to stop.
When I investigate the desire to read scifi, it seems to be connected to desires around intellectual exploration, a sense of wonder/excitement, and some sort of displaced social desire around “camaraderie in service of large-scale goals”. This makes me think it’s a pica, and that I would be better served by using that energy to get more of those things in the real world.
Oh, and an important piece of evidence I forgot to include:
I have a close friend who has a strong “romantic fanfic” habit, and based on observation and conversation it’s extremely clear to me that this is a pica/coping mechanism for them, to imperfectly replace real emotional intimacy/social safety/etc.
The similarity between their behaviors around fanfic and my behaviors around scifi are too strong for me to ignore, so that updates me in the direction of thinking it’s important to uncover what’s going on here.
This was me for quite a few years. I’ve noticed that in times when I’m really depressed I’ll read fanfic until I pass out from exhaustion at 4am, but when I feel happy and emotionally fulfilled (e.g. the past few months) my fanfic habit completely disappears and I feel no desire to read it even when I get notifications for it. Strangely, this wasn’t something I easily identified as pica at our CFAR workshop.
An interesting experiment would be to try giving up fiction in full generality. I think people are insufficiently worried about this.
I don’t have any particularly rigorous thing to support this with, nor do I really think that there’s even any objective truth of the matter to be had about this, but… I just want to note that whenever people talk about cutting out all fiction, it strikes me as Deeply Wrong, the same way it might if someone said they were considering cutting out all friendship from their life. My aesthetic says that fiction is one of those things that makes life worth living in the first place, and that cutting it out makes one’s life worse.
… that said, I recognize that this is just my aesthetic and that other people have different ones, but I felt compelled to push back a little anyway.
So, first of all, like Peter says, I’m not advocating a permanent ban, but a temporary reprieve, for several reasons. I think it’s common to have a lot of addictive and escapist behaviors around fiction (in a way that I think is less common with friendships). I think people are basically on board with this idea as it applies to TV and video games but I would extend it to books as well. My addictive and escapist behaviors over the last 5 years were pretty evenly distributed between video games, anime, manga, and fantasy / sci-fi novels. (And this wasn’t true when I was in college; it all started when I entered grad school and became a lot more socially isolated.)
(It irks me the way e.g. Tumblr has built up this whole memeplex around reading being this wholesome pure thing when it feels to me only slightly less bad than other forms of fictional escapism. People used to worry in the old days about people reading too many novels or comics and I think we should update at least slightly in their direction.)
(The goal of this is not to produce shame in anyone who engages in a lot of fictional escapism; I don’t want to deny anyone their useful and important coping behaviors. This is for anyone who engages in a lot of fictional escapism and doesn’t know it.)
More broadly, I worry about fiction as a source of bad training data; it is not reality, it systematically differs from reality in many ways, and I think people who grew up absorbing a lot of fiction generally get screwed by it in subtle ways (for example, I’ve been posting on Facebook recently about ways in which I feel like my approaches to romantic relationships were screwed up by the TV and movies I watched growing up).
I also worry about fiction as pica, also like Peter says. A friend of mine recently told me about how he watched Avatar: The Last Airbender explicitly at a point in his life where he had no friends, so the characters were his friends instead. Giving up fiction can bring things like this into stark relief; if you notice that when you give up fiction all you do is stare blankly at the walls of your room because your life doesn’t put you into regular contact with other humans by default, that’s a valuable thing you’ve learned about your life / a valuable opportunity to confront the thing if you knew about it already but had been avoiding thinking about it.
A particular kind of fiction-as-pica that I don’t think people talk about enough is using video games as pica for personal growth / skill development (the only piece I’ve seen come close is Pixel Poppers on Fake Achievement, which is what first opened my eyes to this sort of thing). I notice that a lot of enjoyment I get out of playing, say, RPGs is enjoying the experience of my characters getting stronger and more capable of handling the challenges of the game. This is entirely pica; what I actually want is for me to get stronger, not my Pokemon.
I agree that all of the things that you listed can be issues, and if the two of you are just advocating a temporary break in order to recalibrate, then I don’t have an objection. I feel like I’ve seen sentiments in the rationalsphere that weren’t just about taking a temporary break but actually seriously recommending giving up all fiction for good, and I might have been responding more to my recollection of those sentiments than what you were actually saying.
On the thing about fiction as a source of bad training data specifically: agree that this can be an issue, especially if one has a very one-sided diet of fiction. There’s a lot of fiction out there that conveys outright toxic thought patterns and expectations about relationships. (One of my abhorrences is the whole “you get married and then you live happily ever after” trope and stuff related to it, which I suspect does damage in more subtle ways than just the obvious one.)
But at the same time, I would feel that the training data available to someone who didn’t consume much fiction, was also much impoverished compared to someone who consumed a varied diet of quality fiction. Any single person’s life can only provide them with direct experiences of a very small slice of all the possible human experiences and perspectives; somebody who supplemented their ordinary life with fiction could experience a vastly larger amount of them. Yes, those experiences are fictional, but good authors will draw on enough of their own actual life experience—as well as on actual background research—to make their fiction feel plausible and real. And if you are, say, reading an author from a different culture than your own, their own cultural perspective and assumptions will inevitably color the work and give you a taste of entirely different (real) perspectives and underlying assumptions. For example, this was an interesting comment that I happened to read recently:
(The work you consume doesn’t need to be geographically remote, either—if you take novels from even a century or two back, they’re already starting to be more delightfully alien than anything that an average science fiction or fantasy novel is capable of presenting.)
I don’t really find very compelling the psychological studies claiming that literary fiction can boost one’s ability for taking different kinds of perspectives—they suffer from all the standard cautions and caveats of psychological research, plus it’s a proposition that’s difficult to test experimentally—but I would be surprised if that claim wasn’t actually true. One definition of empathy says that it’s about the ability to put yourself in someone else’s head, and good fiction is about exactly that.
I agree that it’s possible to consume fiction in a much healthier, mind-expanding, empathy-increasing way than what I described. We can make a pretty strong analogy with food: many people consume junk food, junk food is plausibly somewhere between pretty bad and extremely bad for you, and taking a break from food (that is, fasting) can be a way to recalibrate yourself and get better attuned to the difference between good and bad food, none of which is to say that we should live our lives entirely without food. Similarly for “junk fiction.”
Yes! I actually thought of a very similar food analogy while typing out my comment, but then didn’t write it down.
FWIW, I have definitely noticed that in times of my life where I’ve felt that I haven’t achieved much, I’ve been really drawn to watching sports anime where the characters get better/overcome stuff/etc. I think this is a combination of pica and reminding myself what I want out of life.
For the record, even though I’m giving up fiction for Rationalist Lent, I would pretty much agree with that. I intend to use it as an opportunity to break what I consider to be bad habits around it and reevaluate its place in my life, not as a prelude to a permanent ban.
Why do you think we should be more worried about reading fiction? Associated addictiveness, time consumption, escapism?
I chose to give up fiction for Rationalist Lent (before reading the comments and before seeing this exchange).
I’ve been observing my fiction (particularly sci-fi) habits for the past year or so, and have tried to reduce/improve them, including making it a major focus both times I attended a CFAR workshop. This has been only marginally successful. The behavior feels addictive in both the sense that I lose sleep or forget other important things due to it, and in the sense that it’s hard to stop.
When I investigate the desire to read scifi, it seems to be connected to desires around intellectual exploration, a sense of wonder/excitement, and some sort of displaced social desire around “camaraderie in service of large-scale goals”. This makes me think it’s a pica, and that I would be better served by using that energy to get more of those things in the real world.
So, all of the above, at least in my case.
Oh, and an important piece of evidence I forgot to include:
I have a close friend who has a strong “romantic fanfic” habit, and based on observation and conversation it’s extremely clear to me that this is a pica/coping mechanism for them, to imperfectly replace real emotional intimacy/social safety/etc.
The similarity between their behaviors around fanfic and my behaviors around scifi are too strong for me to ignore, so that updates me in the direction of thinking it’s important to uncover what’s going on here.
This was me for quite a few years. I’ve noticed that in times when I’m really depressed I’ll read fanfic until I pass out from exhaustion at 4am, but when I feel happy and emotionally fulfilled (e.g. the past few months) my fanfic habit completely disappears and I feel no desire to read it even when I get notifications for it. Strangely, this wasn’t something I easily identified as pica at our CFAR workshop.
Yeah, I have a friend like that too.
I replied to Kaj above.