The purpose of stories is to help us learn how to live.

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The purpose of stories is to help us learn how to live. So many of the stories we currently learn from, often from a very young age, are provided to us through popular culture, through movies and television. The creators of these stories most often center them around conflict. Conflict is a part of life, therefore learning how to work through conflict could be one useful approach to any given culture’s stories. However, so many of our popular culture’s versions of conflict focus on a hero and a villain, or some variation on that pattern, and the story ends when the hero defeats the villain, and the viewer is expected to most identify with the protagonist, with the hero. This is no way to have any sort of general understanding as to how we should approach conflict, and yet having been raised on such stories our subconscious is shot through with them, and we see the results of this all the time, in how the people around us approach every sort of interaction and situation. Vanquishing an enemy is no way to resolve a conflict.



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