I hate writing. The act of it, specifically: turning ideas into words and arranging them in sentences. The preceding step is fine. 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. My future self must write them.

Why do I shunt this task off to my future self? Not because pressing the right sequence of keystrokes is especially hard. Laptop keys are quite light. I avoid writing because it forces me to stop imagining what I might write, and start reading what I do write. Every time I read back what I have written, I find it has collapsed into a single sequence of words. My previously imagined sequences have grown distant and shut themselves off. Often, it turns out those imaginings were never possible to begin with. They fade like a mirage as I read.

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, dancing.

In the limit, given perfect memory and infinite time to choose, there is 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 strange. It is true, or at least true in the Sherlock Holmes stories, that Holmes had a liver. But it is 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, they 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. A story.

This means a fictional world does not need to be better than your own to be worth escaping into. It does not even have to be especially unlike your own. 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 raises a question: 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?

We need detail in fiction because we are bad at fantasy. Specifically, we are bad at the forgetting part of it. 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 cannot escape taking ourselves along. That is 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. Superhero movies, isekai, 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 is gappy, vague, missing detail. This is true of our personal pasts, but truer of the past before we were born, whose details memory cannot confront us with.

Just as we use fiction as a prop for fantasy, we use the past as a prop for nostalgia. Ideal props include ruins, static-hissing music, 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 fantasy. You do not 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 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 and your fantasy of being a great writer can fit into a single imagined life.

We distrust the young as much for this presence of fantasy as for their lack of experience. The converse is true of the old. We trust them for their experience, but more for their lack of a future to fantasise about. This sounds counterintuitive, but why else would we crave the advice of the dying, even those dying young, if not because their brief respite from fantasy reveals to them the awful, overflowing richness of life?