What kind of people can you surround yourself with in these strange times, when you cannot venture into gatherings with people you know, and don’t know how to make the living stories of your life? 

You read stories. Particularly fiction, long or short, where you cannot wield your own control over characters – how they think, and how their lives have been, and how they will turn out. 

You may think that idea is fictitious, but reading stories have been borne out in repeated studies to expand your emotional range, making you more open to possibilities and understanding other people’s predicaments and points of view. In other words, it makes you have the kind of smarts that really matter especially in these times, when it is all too easy to sink down the rabbit hole of our own individual spins of what we think the world should be, echoed only by people who reinforce those same beliefs. 

Here are two powerful reasons from a shelf of studies on why you should make reading fiction one of the storylines you live by:

1. Reading fiction enables you to do emotional gymnastics.

When I interview potential team members, the most important question I ask them is, “What are your favorite books and why?”

That really has reliably given me such an insight as to the “size” of the real estate they carry inside their heads. I do not mean IQ because that is only one measure and a narrow one, and the school certificates pretty much already give an indication of that. I particularly note the ones who read fiction and the ones who are aware of why they love reading fiction or stories of other people, other than the ones they like or idolize.

Being in an organization with all kinds of people, from all walks of life facing a variety of challenges naturally require emotional agility from its members. An appreciation for reading stories gives me a good signal of someone’s potential for that kind of emotional gymnastics that defines a team’s way of working with other team members. This study proved that fiction readers maintained or even bolstered their social abilities and were more empathetic. If your team is emotionally agile, they can adapt to the many adventures that you will have to face together.

2. Fiction helps you lead better because you resist the easy and often wrong ‘black and white’ view of the world.

The defining thing about being human is our complexity. While we constantly delude ourselves that things can either be just good or evil, “for” or “against” something, “communist” or “pro-government,” we all know in our bare honesty when we are by ourselves in our own heads, that the truth indeed is a story and not a “label.” It means you have to know and understand the story before you can make up your mind so that you can also respond with your uniquely human toolkit – with a decision that is nuanced, matching the human situation like bespoke colored tapestry – because nothing is ever purely black or white.

I think when electing public officials, we should also ask them what fiction they have read and why to see how much work they have been giving to their inner lives, which will impact our public lives.

The Harvard Business Review’s Ideacast interview of a Harvard Business School Professor gives leaders the insight as to how, aside from following evolving business stories, fiction shapes a leader’s brain to know how to navigate across many competing views (and not simply “good” or “evil”), which is what organizational life is made of.

In a 2013 study, leaders who read fiction (not only novels but also short stories) are more creative, thoughtful, and comfortable with competing views. The researchers think it was because people who read fiction did not have a need for “cognitive closure” (a need to quickly make a decision because you are uncomfortable with many competing views). Reading stories other than the ones you yourself live through opens you up to a wide range of views about the world so you are able to resist the urge to rely on only a few “easy” bits of the only information you are familiar with, which may likely leave out what really counts to the organization and not just your interests.

These studies prove that the stories you ingest work on your “insides” to shape you and how you view the world. They become your “subterranean” stories, your inner labyrinth of rivers that give you a sense of expanse and arrows of possibilities as to how lives could flow.

Even if you do not want to belong to an organization or be a leader, reading stories affords you many kinds of villages in your head, where you could live up, down, sideways and every other angle possible in being human. That kind of inner life is what we all need for our lives, because the only thing we really know for certain is that we were “given” time, no matter how short or long, without asking for it in the first place.

We did not even have a choice about the kind of body we will have, the family we were born into, or the abilities we carry without having to work for it. Then we have to live – swim – in a vast sea of uncertainties about everything. If we were limited in our range of emotional responses, defined only by what we have experienced and believe ourselves, we would easily break or equally worse, we could break others who are also just trying to swim the same sea with us.

So if you are desperately missing the nuanced complexity of the extended human shuffling of emotions and ideas that Zooms cannot really capture, read fiction. The characters may not be actual people you can find in Linked-in, but their thoughts, situations, and emotions are as real as your longing right now.  – Rappler.com

Maria Isabel Garcia is a science writer. She has written two books, “Science Solitaire” and “Twenty One Grams of Spirit and Seven Ounces of Desire.” You can reach her at sciencesolitaire@gmail.com.