I kind of hate writing. I mean actually writing, as in turning ideas into words and arranging them in sentences. The preceding step (where I actually have the ideas) is great. It's great because new ideas suggest great things. Not necessarily any great thing in particular (which could fail to happen, or fail to make me happy) but great things in general, which are unthreateningly vague.
If I could leave my ideas in a drawer somewhere, imagine them grown, then pull out an essay, my life would be much nicer. But ideas are not like mold. They do not grow of their own accord. Instead my future self must write them.
Why do I shunt this task off to my future self? It can't be because pressing the right sequence of keystrokes is especially hard. Laptop keys are actually quite light and easy to press. Instead, I think I avoid writing because it forces me to stop imagining what I might write, and start reading what I do write, and this really, really sucks.
It sucks because every time I go to read back what I've written, I find it's collapsed into a single sequence of words. My previously imagined sequences have grown distant and shut themselves off to me. Often, it turns out those imaginings were never possible to begin with, and they fade like a mirage as I read.
Of course, this experience is not unique to writing. Borges could build a gallery to complement his library. When you take a photo, you are plucking a single grid of colour out of pixel-space and into reality. The same is true of painting, drawing, sculpting, or dancing.
In the limit, given perfect memory and infinite time to choose, there's no difference between selection and creation. God would be one such perfect selector/creator. In creating us, he plucked us from the ocean of possibility into our single, actual world. Is that why He spent five days procrastinating?
Fictional worlds are weird. It's true, or at least it's true in the Sherlock Holmes stories, that Holmes (being human) had a liver. But it's not true that his liver is large, or small, or any particular size at all.
This is not a peculiarity of Holmes or his liver. There is a fact of the matter about what Caesar ate for breakfast on his seventh birthday, even if we could never know it. But there is no fact of the matter fixing what Bilbo ate for breakfast on his seventh birthday, even if we can be sure he had such a birthday, and ate at least one such breakfast.
This might be why we escape into fictional worlds. Fictional worlds have plenty of space for us to escape into. Unlike the real world, fictional worlds are underdetermined by their details. Strictly speaking, they are not worlds at all, but only the outlines of worlds. The same applies to any fictional life you might imagine yourself living. It is not really a life, but the outline of a life, i.e. a story.
This means a fictional world doesn't need to be better than your own to be worth escaping into (A Little Life). It doesn't even have to be especially unlike your own (Tao Lin was/is mostly read in Brooklyn). When we escape into fiction, we are not trying to go from one shitty particularity to another, better particularity. We go to escape particularity itself.
This is true, but it makes me wonder: why do we escape into such detailed fictional worlds? Shouldn't "Once upon a time some stuff happened" be the most popular destination for escape, since it leaves the most room for fantasy?
I think we need detail in fiction because we suck at fantasy. Specifically, we suck at the forgetting part of fantasising. Of travels in space, Seneca said: "Do you ask why your flight is of no avail? You take yourself along". Our flights into fiction are just as fruitless if we can't escape taking ourselves along. That's why we need the profusion of detail in our fictional lives and worlds. The details are props to help us forget ourselves.
Often, we put up with second-rate escapes into fiction. These are escapes into the kinds of art we (wrongly) call escapist. Think of superhero movies, isekai, or romance novels. These let you escape the unfulfillment of your everyday desires for power, freedom, or sex. Actually escapist art would let you escape the desires themselves.
Fiction is not our only destination for escape. Like fiction, the past (from the present point of view) is gappy, vague, missing detail. This is true of our personal pasts (both memory and remembering are selective), but it is truer of the past before we were born, whose details memory can't confront us with.
Just like we use fiction as a prop for fantasy, we use the past as a prop for our nostalgia. Ideal props include ruins, static-hissing music, and hazy, faded photographs. Time has scrubbed away the details of each such prop (or at least the prop pretends it has). Either way, the absence of detail leaves space for our fantasies. You don't need rose coloured glasses to be nostalgic; any blindfold will do.
The past is not the only time without detail. As the details of the past are unrecallable, so the details of the future are unforeseeable. Both invite our fantasy to fill the gaps, at least until they are crowded out by facts.
This is truest when you are a child. In childhood, the details of your possible futures are slim enough to fit into a single imagined life. So we aspire to be firefighting novelist-astronauts. When you are a little older, there is still room for one such dream to coexist with the rapidly accumulating lump of facts that is your actual life. For a while longer, you know little enough about your ability, and can imagine little enough about your aspiration, that the reality of your writing ability and your fantasy of being a great writer can fit into a single imagined life.
It's as much for this presence of fantasy as for their lack of experience that we distrust the young. The converse is true of the old. We trust them for their experience, sure, but we trust them more for their lack of a future to fantasize about. This sounds stupid, but why else would we crave the advice of the dying (even those who are dying young), if not because their brief respite from fantasy reveals to them the awful, overflowing richness of life?