Fantasy

When I was alone in places like the airport lounge or cafe just waiting for clients, I remember thinking how I rarely making up fantasies anymore. I used to do that, a lot. Be it a fantasy to be a Nobel prize winner, be able to fly away like a bird, creating a teleporter appliance that can beam me to places, become an unparalleled kungfu master, or to some extent having a romantic encounter with Sophie Marceau (at that time). Perhaps marriage life made me even more pragmatic and rather detached to the 'Joie de vivre' normally associated with youth and childhood.

In fact, one of the thing that separate us, human beings, from animals and robots is our ability to use our fantasy. we can teach a machine how to combine elements. Yet we can't program a machine the function and meaning of fantasy. Because fantasy has to do with imagination and a machine can only work with countable objects, or at least that's what I know of now. Mankind reach their status now in this world because of fantasy. Greater inventions, explorations, wars, major leaps in technology and almost whole aspect of our life is the results of fantasy of our predecessor.

Fantasies usually are unrealistic though. The minute we got something, we usually don't or even can't, want it anymore. For the fantasies to continue exist, desire needs absent object. So it is safe to say that desire supports itself with crazy fantasies. We're usually at the most happy when we're day-dreaming about future happiness. "The hunt is sweeter than the kill" or "Be careful what you wish for". Not because we'll get it, but because we're doomed not to want it anymore.

Could this conceivably be the reason why some of the most powerful people on earth acting like they are God ? Because there's only few things that they're actually can not get with all their might and power. Perhaps just itching to nuke down a marketplace just to see if they can get away with it. Or launch an air strike against a rogue country while the whole world is against it, just to show who's the boss. Well, that's just one of the scary side of fantasy.

Indulging fantasy is not always healthy too. It will made it harder for us to distinguish the real and the imagination. But some able to be productive and creative with their fantasies, people like Tolkien and JK Rowlings are among those who manage to mesmerize us with the sheer brilliance of their imaginative mind.

I have to remind myself that for my upcoming new year resolution is to bring back those fantasy to eliminates the tedium and mundane state of real life.