There are many happy moments in real life. But real life doesn't last only for the time it takes to read a story. Stories are a small piece of life, it dramatized to make them interesting.
You know the short story has to have a satisfying ending and leave the person reading it feeling like they have gotten to the end. Real-life works are entirely different. We have lots of "stories" going on in our lives all the time; they overlap, they are not efficient, they even have rarely clear-cut endings.
People tell stories for many purposes: to teach, entertain, share experience, and make a point. They also listen to stories for many purposes: to get out of their own head for a while, intimately experience something that they do not have to work on, to learn from the experiences of others, to be entertained, and escape their own lives.
In a good story, the person hearing the story gets into the world and feels to some level like they are the "one" that the story is happening to. They are rooting for the main character to win. It is gratifying to them when the main character meets their challenges, scary or sad when the main character faces loss or pain, and finally, satisfying when the prominent character triumphs over all the different things that tried to take them down.
There are lots of short stories in which the story is less contained. It is shorter, and the endings are not always complete or satisfying. This form is enjoyable because it allows the reader to continue it in their mind, thinking about the meaning and what could have happened next.
For me, life is like those short stories. It may have a beginning, middle, and end, but it is not a coherent plot that begins with a problem and ends with the solution. Yes, most stories are indeed structured with a 'resolution' because readers expect the story to be neatly wrapped up at the end. Usually, this means the "good" get rewarded, and the "bad" get punished—we kinda like it like that.
But real life is an entirely different matter. No scriptwriter is tying up all the loose ends or ensuring some moral at the end. We all try to make the best of our situations and achieve a degree of happiness or contentment. Everything is just neatly falling into place. And, even for them, nothing is permanent.
YOU ARE READING
An ako Mirasol
PoesíaReal life isn't neatly divided into a sequence of stories where each one has definite end. So, the question of whether or not real life has happy endings is moot. It really just depends... which moment you want to call it "endings".
