Some people read fiction when they were kids, but when they become adults, it becomes a waste of time. People are too busy reading non-fiction books to improve their lives, business, relationships, and understanding of the world. Who has time for those silly stories?

Well, you are wrong. If you don’t read fiction, you live in a fiction, the fiction of the reality—the cruel world where you walk from those romantic stories to the horror.

But if you ever restart reading the fiction, giving a wake-up kick to your kid, young soul, well, you will restart living the reality, riding away from the fictional reality we all live: the success, money, marriage, religion, politics, except the earth, water, air, and fire. Fiction is the pinnacle of human creativity in written form. For the same reasons you pick that non-fiction, you still can pick a fiction, sit under a tree with your chai or popcorn, and re-emerge as a mythical beast, a fairy, a worrier, and so on and so forth; in those fictional faces, you face the realities you live. Well, well, well, I confused you, just like no fiction writers, especially those self-help guys, sorry.

For me, first, it was for similar reasons that I had read non-fiction: I wanted to improve my writing, especially the writing skills required for my work. Then, a miracle happened; as I read a number of books about writing, I discovered that fiction was the best way to improve and practice writing skills. Yes, it is. Fiction is the real pitch where you need to play right with the words; it’s rugged, space runs till infinity—the borderlessness is frightening, and no one is there with you to tell you what to do; if you get lost, you will die. It is the immense ocean where you swim alone. You will face sea daemons, shakes, jellyfish, and mermaids, and you will have to tell them how to live their lives and use them to find your way out. They are the words you use. Did I confuse you further? Well, that is how the devils tell you the road to heaven. Writing non-fiction is like the minor leagues in terms of skill and difficulty, while fiction is the major leagues, and literary fiction is like the World Series.

Later, while researching and writing The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, I said enough to non-fiction. That point in the fiction became my backdoor from where I escaped and took my mind off everything I obsessed over daily. And while I had read some fiction in the past, this is when fiction began to shine. I started to see more benefits of reading fiction.

My English teacher, Gunasekera, was right, and I realised it in my 40s. he would say, “We read books because we can never know enough people.” It’s one of those pithy truths you don’t appreciate until you’ve gotten older. We often self-select the people in our lives. What is meant by that is that we often become friends with people who share our interests, views and experiences. We fear and dislike the contrasting values and tastes. We often look for experiences that confirm our previous experiences and dearly-held beliefs. Whatever we say, we are still getting used to a world with diversity. So, all sorts of storytelling are cool hacks designed to get humans to think outside of their own narrow experience and consider other points of view.

You will see Ukraine differently if you read Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried or Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. You can read one hundred non-fiction about South Korea in its dawn, but you will still learn much more from Wale. Unless you read Funny Boy and Story of A Brief Marriage, none of those non-fictions about Sri Lanka’s war will tell you about human emotions.

In many ways, these stories felt more true to me than any non-fiction because they exposed me to experiences far beyond my reach. Books are special in that they temporarily transport us into the brains of the writer, his community, his context, etc. And it’s through fiction that we can actually get a glimpse of the authentic experiences of others. Which, if it sounds familiar, is because it is. It’s called human empathy and humanness. And reading enhances your empathy.

When you look at recent events, WWI, WWII, the Srebrenica Genocide, the Soviet revolution, and today’s Ukraine, a culture of violence is still present in Europe much more than in any other continent. Still, in medieval Europe, violence is glorified. Humans were burned alive in public, animal torturing was a sport, and humans were flogged and tarred and feathered and ripped apart limb by limb all across the continent. Domestic violence was rampant, much more than in today’s Africa and Asia. Infanticide was common, though it was never highlighted. War was pretty much a constant and was an art of life. Then, towards the 18th century, this culture started to blur. Public executions became less common. People stopped believing in sources, and torture dropped, being the recreational pastime it once was. There are several theories for this change. People started to read.

The printing press was invented in 1440, but it became popular at a languid pace; it took centuries to become famous. The effect was that by the 1700s, people had developed the habit of reading books— most of them were fiction. This is when great classic European authors like Dickens, Goethe, and Flaubert emerged. And we see a clear trend that violence among people distresses significantly. Several studies highlight the correlation between increased reading and a decrease in violence in Europe. People started to realise that everyone else had their own internal worlds but that these internal worlds should be accepted without judgement: Here comes empathy and enlightenment—the first block for the foundation of human rights. The fiction brought us to the reality that, as humans, we have to exercise our empathitic muscles and embrce the reality of the fiction we live in—unconditional acceptance. The pathway to non-violence teaches us to see the world as others do to understand how they think, even if we don’t necessarily agree with or like them.

Besides the reality of fiction, fiction allows us to run away from the realities and hide in safe worlds of our own. Thus, the cognitive benefits of reading go far beyond empathy. It increases your communication, reasoning, creativity, and ability to connect the dots.

And it enhances your memory. It allows you to fight diseases like dementia and Parkinson’s. Reading is basically like doing a devil-lift for your mind. Reading good fiction is like having a great workout in the gym. On the other hand, watching TV makes you passive and susceptible to suggestion. You are simply an empty vessel receiving noise. Music, while engaging, is abstract and formless and often occupies our mind, not its contents. But reading constantly demands active engagement from your brain. Fiction allows you to practice this engagement while simultaneously providing the same escapism you get through diverse sorts of entertainment.

Reading fiction could be the ideal way to have fun and get away from the daily stresses of your life while giving a boost to your cognitive functioning at the same time.