You're sitting in a movie theater, about to watch the latest hit movie. You're not sure of the genre: melodrama, action, mystery, fantasy, sci-fi - but, it doesn't matter because you're just here to see if it's as good as everyone says it is. You walked in expecting to watch a movie that you think probably didn't deserve all the hype surrounding it, but after getting enthralled in an alternate universe with gripping, complex characters, you can understand the praise.

You love the film, just like everyone said you would, but as soon as that initial excitement is over, you start to wonder if your life will ever be as interesting as the characters you just watched.

As humans, we have the amazing ability to storify our lives. In other words, make everything seem like it might in a book or a movie to mentally organize large events in a chronological order. This makes memories sweeter and clearer, and even if what we think we remember isn't exactly what happened, it keeps things in line. It also helps when you're trying to tell funny stories to your friends (but that's besides the point).

Part of life now is basing yourself online, and creating a sort of supercut of all the good parts, pretending the bad never existed to begin with. Youtube vloggers, for example, generate massive followings founded on the fact that their life is (seemingly) more interesting than yours.

It's all about how you present yourself, and how your story comes across. If we're able to know ourselves like that, and be that interested in our own life story, then we're probably able to be AS interested in someone else's life story. That's why we post what we post, and so carefully choose the stories we tell, and (to get back to my original point) also why we watch movies.

Movies show us what we think life looks like when we're finished, what we think our stories should feel like. They foreshadow what is to come, dramatize our emotions, and leave us with a final answer to the original problem (or not - sequels anyone?!). They're usually fast paced and they feel like what life was made to look like. At any moment, any of the characters know exactly what to say to keep things moving. When you were sat there in that movie theater, you couldn't believe someone's life was like that. You really couldn't believe that your life hasn't been like that.

And don't worry, your life probably won't be like that.

Bad things happen, and they won't stop happening until you die. There's no end-all-be-all for problem solving, and you may not be the space cadet who saves the world, but who cares? In cinema, we see characters go through something crazy in a set amount of days or hours, with no downtime shown in between (because really who wants to see Katniss Everdeen make the full 20 minute walk to her hunting spot?). But in your real life, you're probably really only "doing" something for half of the day, the rest is commuting or eating or sleeping or chilling or literally anything uninteresting. You're not perfectly scripted either: you don't always know what to say, you act different with different groups of people, etc. Moreover, once you finish your "journey" of something, you need to go keep going, the movie doesn't end for you, because it didn't exist in the first place.

And that's fine.

There will be trying moments where you need to step up and make some big decision that may define you in some way, of course there will be. You'll have those "movie moments" now and then, trying to make things consistently work out for you. But in the mean time, don't waste real life trying to make sure you're living in a scripted, action-intense universe.

And honestly? You're probably pretty lucky that you're not, anyway.