Time dilation

Nobody thinks that movies are realistic; they're storytelling instruments that present a more exceptional, more glamorous, more action-filled and more important version of life. But what is it exactly that requires movies to be unrealistic? Or, to put it another way, if we wanted to make the most realistic movie, what could we get rid of before the movie became unwatchable?

Take away the spectacular settings and you've still got all the realistic drama and comedy. Take away the significance of the situations and the word-perfect wit and snappy dialogue, and you've got reality TV. Take away the direction and control over the narrative and you've got a documentary. You can keep cutting and cutting and you still seem to have a viable medium. The one thing you can't cut, though, is cutting itself. Editing. Selecting the important parts and leaving the rest.

I think you could take anyone's life and just cut out all the parts where nothing happens, and you would get a pretty interesting movie. In fact, there have been some fairly successful variations on that idea. On the other hand, imagine a regular movie with all the boring parts put back in. The establishing scene where the lead character has a boring job and quits could take years! When the down-and-out boxer has to train up for the big fight you'd just be watching the same workouts for months and months.

Perhaps one of the most harmful things about our otherwise excellent storytelling culture is that it tends to treat life as a sequence of important things happening one after another. If the protagonist doesn't know what to do and flounders about for years, you just show a few directionless scenes in rapid succession, then cut to when they start to figure it out. But real life is mostly the bits in between the important things, and most of the important things are really consequences of or decisions about all the stuff you do the rest of the time.

Life would really be much easier if we had that kind of instant connection between action and result. If we could decide to learn kung fu, time dilate, and now we know kung fu. Or, better still, decide to follow an idea, time dilate, and discover if it succeeded or failed. Not even for the rewards, just to know if it was a good decision or not. In reality it often takes a long time to find out, and in the mean time you have to just do things hoping that it'll turn out you were right all along. If you're expecting the decision to lead directly to the result, it's pretty surprising to find out that the result actually comes from a series of actions, and the decision is just the first one of those.

So, in the absence of a magical time-dilating remote control, we just have to get used to waiting. But even that is its own kind of sequence-of-important-events thinking. All the in-between bits are when you get to experience the process of what you're doing, rather than just the result. And, since it's going to be the main experience you have, it pays to make the process as enjoyable as possible.