To make life into a story is to project onto it meaning. If you don&#x27;t view life as narrative, what do your actions matter?<p>The &quot;happy endings, fairness, justice, heroes, villains, turnabouts, karma&quot; JoshTriplett lists are the narrative  projections which make life feel valuable in spite of life&#x27;s trending towards wavering extremes of boredom and suffering.<p>The OP&#x27;s argument coincides with the Buddhist and Taoist positions, who prescribe a lack of attachment to all mental constructs -- be that family, culture, love, hate, beauty, honor, good, evil, progress, and so on.<p>I get the logic behind it, it&#x27;s an attempt to reduce life to the unassailably true. However, I think that sort of detached reductionism invariably leads to the view of the universe as a meaningless expanse of material, with an ordered procession of predestined material actions and reactions.<p>Is the meaningless material universe the true universe? Perhaps, but life feels like much more than that.<p>I prefer the ancient Hindu philosophical counterpart.  They also believed, as the Buddhists and Taoists do, that at the most fundamental level it&#x27;s all meaningless, but that by some miracle the meaningful emerges from the meaningless by way of our experience of it.  The mind gives reality to the unreal, and that&#x27;s a good thing.<p>Sure, the narrative we project onto the world may be fiction, but without it the material universe is a blank book. If life be fiction, give me fiction.