Sure, there's the obvious comparison, that the latter two are not reality, and reality is closer to a stream of consciousness than the latter two are*, but I often wonder whether we view life as more of a series of tasks just to make things manageable.
I suppose the most obvious form of that is how games and stories --particularly in Fantasy-- emphasize the quest as basically a task manager.
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| From Matthew Willis and swordscomic.com. Also from the BBC. |
When I used to keep track of my work activities in a daily calendar** about 30 years ago, I never looked at it as a "Quest Log", but in it's own way it was. Even today, while I don't keep a formal to-do list, I run over all of the things I'm supposed to do in a given day and set about doing them. You know, things like "do a load of the laundry", "cut the grass", and "write a blog post"***.
Okay, cutting the grass might not happen since we're supposed to have rain today, but the other two are getting done.
Is this us attempting to make sense of the world and cutting down to easily serviceable tasks, or did we train ourselves to do this because we looked at what we did in video games and books and thought "You know what, we could do something like this in real life!" Either way, I think Franklin Planner is making a lot of money on this.
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| From Wikipedia on Franklin Planner. |
*Although my reading of Mrs. Dalloway for an English seminar at university might beg to differ about the "stream of consciousness" part.
**I had so many things to do in a day, I was lucky if I got about half of them done in about 12 hours.
***That's mainly a "during Blaugust" thing. Admittedly, I start writing after 9 PM when I remember that I ought to write a post.
#Blaugust2026
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