We like stories because we get conflicts that resolve the way we want them to resolve. When we invest in a story and don't get the ending we want, we are unhappy. I don't think that art is required to make people happy. Maybe that's a conscious decision a creator has to make when telling a story. Is this for an introspective person or a more passive person? Is this person going to interact or react? Maybe it doesn't matter that much. In all our communication, I think, there's going to be an ongoing calculation between the general and the specific. Regular joke or inside joke? Make an inside joke that is also funny to people outside the joke, so it's funny to all? Layers. Cram a bunch of stuff in there and let them pick what they like.

I read an article about Elena Tonra, the lead singer of Daughter and her solo album. At some point I wrote to myself: "I want to write like her but that means I want to be like her which means I would have to live like her but I don't want to live like her but I have lived like her before and really I just need to remember no it's not the same but it can be the same as something."

The stream of consciousness style is deliberate there, for example. Trying to capture the feeling of thinking thoughts like that; to convey that the person saying it is also hearing it and tumbling along in the torrent of words. Theory of mind scholars will probably correct me, but I think that our whole body is a thinking thing and our conscious thought (aka the voice in our heads) is a distilled from all the input, like fine whiskey. Well, if whiskey also generated a magnetic field, which is how I think of our sense of self, aka consciousness. 

Fun stuff.