Fantasy, real life, problem solving

[erratio]

I have recently realised that i I ever want to be a Serious Intellectual (or even just do things that are cool but challenging, like programming pet projects), I'll need to cut back on my fantasy/sci fi reading  and game-playing hobbies. The reason? My 'thing', that dictates what I find the most interesting, is basically problem-solving. Present me with a complicated system or problem and I will bend over backwards trying to understand it (and then get bored as soon as I sufficiently understand it. This is definitely a weakness of mine, since "I understand what I need to do to get the answer but I can't motivate myself to go through the boring mechanical part" doesn't fly as an excuse at uni). But any competent fiction author is also a decent worldbuilder. And those fictional worlds hold just as much attraction for me as real life science, since a well-built fictional world is a shiny new complex system that I start out knowing nothing about and need to unravel through the hints that the author drops in passing. As for computer games, they thrive on being able to use systems too complicated for a human to calculate by hand, and usually also have giant worlds to explore.
So in short, my brain doesn't distinguish well enough between reality and fiction. And what's more, fictional worlds are almost always easier to understand than real world problems. This makes it more pleasant to read books and play games than to work on real world stuff, since I get a faster payoff. The trick will be to train myself to be able to ignore those short-term gains and go for the longer-term ones that are ultimately more satisfying.

Comments

[lotusvine.livejournal.com]

Are you sure you're not devaluing SF/F in this statement? What are the merits to being a 'serious intellectual'? Why will 'serious stuff' be ultimately more satisfying that exploring imaginary worlds? Do you think you have a bias towards 'serious' stuff because it has more of a more serious weight and prestige to it and others, perhaps your parents, will value it more? Unless of course, you're heading towards career academia! :)

[erratio.livejournal.com]

Why Serious Stuff is ultimately more satisfying: because no matter how absorbing a fantasy world is, it's ultimately a made up system with no or very little connection to anything else. Whereas if I spend some time learning about how drugs affect people's brains, or something like that, I can connect it to other stuff I know about the real world and be able to apply it to real world situations.
Fictional worlds created by a really good author are convincing illusions but unlike real life it's possible to know everything there is about a fictional world, and once you reach that point there's literally nowhere else to go.* The real world has unlimited depth - no matter how much you study a single field there's always more.

*I don't think fanfics count, because that's just making stuff up rather than finding stuff that was already there. Writing your own world is another matter entirely, and could well be as satisfying as the real world, but I doubt I'll ever find out personally.

Finally, a lot of the real world is downright cooler or weirder than anything an author could make up, to the point where if an author included it in a story most readers would mock them for being unrealistic. I'd mention a couple of cool things from linguistics but I suspect they're only really cool to a linguistics nerd like me :)

I won't deny that there's a prestige / conformity aspect to it, but I don't think it's the main reason. I also won't deny that I'm an aspiring academic :)

[erratio.livejournal.com]

PS: My parents have nothing to do with this. My parent's house is basically a SF/F library, and my mother would be thrilled if I'd turned out to be an aspiring author. She still brings it up occasionally, not realising that just because I wrote ok stories in Year 6 doesn't mean I have the inspiration to write a novel :p