I think you should get your heart broken as often as possible. I try to do it three or four times a week. Not in real life. At the movies. Like Nicole. Nicole understands. And that is why she is our Queen. Here’s what’s been happening to me lately. I’ll read a headline about something genuinely devastating. Something that, if I really sat with it, should completely wreck me. A tragedy. A crisis. Something real, happening to real people, right now. And my reaction is just… “Man, that’s awful.” And then I scroll on. Before I know it, that horrible, painful thing is an afterthought. And I want to be clear about something. It’s not that I don’t care about the tragedies that come into the feed. It’s that the way I’m encountering this information is specifically designed to prevent me from caring fully as a human being. A notification. A fifteen second clip. A headline between two memes. The format tells my brain this is content to be consumed, not a human story to be felt. And when everything arrives the same way, wars, political corruption, celebrity gossip, natural disasters, sports scores, Kalshi predictions on whether or not we’re gonna drop a nuke and also if Timothée Chalamet will win the Oscar… it all starts to flatten. Not because the tragedies aren’t real. But because the delivery system treats them like they aren’t. It’s like every channel on the mixer is pushed all the way up. And instead of feeling more, you just get noise. Flat. Constant. Background. And somewhere along the way, your emotional response doesn’t disappear. It just dulls. And then I go to the movies. I sit in a dark room. I watch something I know isn’t real. And it destroys me. I’m crying over people who don’t exist. Situations that never happened. A completely constructed emotional experience. And somehow, that hits harder than the real thing. Why? Why does something fictional feel more real than reality? I don’t think it’s because stories are more powerful than real life. I think it’s because real life, the way we experience it now, isn’t built to be felt. It’s built to be processed. You skim it. You categorize it. You move on. Stories don’t let you do that. They inherently slow you down. They give pain, joy, loss, tragedy, victory, love, heartache and hope a shape, a face, a beginning, a middle, and an end. They don’t let you scroll past it. They make you stay. The problem isn’t that the news isn’t real. It’s that it arrives in fragments. A headline. A clip. A scroll. Nothing has a beginning or an end. Nothing asks you to stay. A story does. In a story, your attention is locked. There’s no next tab. No notification. No algorithm pulling you somewhere else. You’re just there. And when your attention is actually there, your emotions follow. And there’s something else going on too. Stories give you proximity to pain without responsibility. You don’t have to fix it. You don’t have to respond to it. You don’t have to do anything except feel it. Fully. Without guilt. Without the pressure to act immediately. And that’s something most of us don’t give ourselves permission to do anymore. So it’s not that stories make you feel more than reality. It’s that they don’t let you look away. And the more I sit with that, the more I think this isn’t just entertainment. It’s maintenance. Here’s the analogy I keep coming back to. When you go to the gym, you’re not lifting weights because lifting weights is the point. You’re lifting weights in a controlled, artificial environment so that your body is strong enough to handle the demands of the real world outside the gym. The workout isn’t the destination. It’s the preparation. I think stories work the same way. When I sit in a dark room and let something wreck me, when I feel grief for people who don’t exist, fear for situations that never happened, I’m doing reps. I’m exercising something. Empathy. The capacity to feel what someone else feels. To imagine a life that isn’t mine and care about what happens to it. And like any muscle, if you don’t use it, it atrophies. If you only ever engage with things that are comfortable and easy and safe, you slowly lose access to everything else. The range of motion closes down. The sensitivity fades. But here’s the thing about the gym. You don’t go to the gym and never leave. The workout only means something if you take the body somewhere. If you do nothing with the strength you’ve built, the reps were just reps. The point was never the lifting. The point was what the lifting makes possible. Same thing here. I don’t want to mistake feeling a lot of emotion for a fictional character for meaningful action in the real world. Crying at a movie is not the same as showing up for someone. Being moved is not the same as moving. But I do think one leads to the other, if you let it. The practice of feeling something fully and of not looking away, of staying in the room with someone else’s pain even when it’s uncomfortable… that’s not the destination. It’s the training. It’s building the muscle memory of care so that when the real moment comes, you’re not starting from zero. So feel it. Let it wreck you. And then take that somewhere. So when I hear someone say “I don’t want to watch something sad right now”, I get it. I really do. But I also think that instinct, taken too far, leads somewhere worse. Because the world is not going to stop being hard. The headlines are not going to stop coming. The noise is not going to quiet down on its own. And if you spend enough time avoiding the things that might hurt, you wake up one day and realize you’ve gone numb. Not because you’re broken. Because you adapted. Because the alternative felt like too much. But here’s what I know. When I let a story wreck me, when I sit in the dark and feel something all the way through, I can feel my chest open back up. I can feel the electricity of empathy moving through me again. It reminds me what I’m capable of feeling. It reminds me what it actually means to be a person paying attention. The world needs people who are paying attention. So yeah. Get your heart broken. On purpose. Regularly. As often as you can manage. Not because it’s fun. Not because it’s cathartic, exactly. But because it’s one of the only places left where you can feel something all the way through without being asked to immediately do something about it. And if the world starts to feel like noise… and the only place you remember how to feel is inside a story? That’s not weakness. That might be exactly the point. I made a video about this too, including two specific films that broke me open in ways I didn’t expect. You can watch it here: - Curt Thanks for reading Story Matters by Curt Mega! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit curtmega.substack.com
