The Pleasures of Imagination

I stumbled upon an article from the Chronicle for Higher Learning while doing research on a character. It goes into the imagination and how it’s a uniquely human thing and something that most of us spend more time in than our thoughts about sex.

It was very enlightening and a great read.

“How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex.

Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing. While citizens of other countries might watch less television, studies in England and the rest of Europe find a similar obsession with the unreal.”

If you’d like to read the full text of the article, you can find it here:

The Pleasures of Imagination