I am reminded of a classic Derek Siver’s post on Drama where he shared a lesson from a talk by Kurt Vonnegut. I think of this post when I find myself over reacting to a piece of news or data.
Kurt Vonnegut contrasts the arc of the stories with that of our life. For example, here are two common popular story arcs – the Cinderella story and the common disaster story.
Kurt Vonnegut contrasts this to our life’s story arc.
You can see the problem.
As Vonnegut explains – “People have been hearing fantastic stories since time began. The problem is that they think life is supposed to be like the stories. So people pretend there is drama where there is none.”
This is partly why we invent conflict, fights, attempt to save the day, and over react to what happens to us. We create drama where this is none.
Or, as Derek observes, we try to make our life into a fairy tale.
A Learning a Day 