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NancyLebovitz comments on The danger of living a story - Singularity Tropes - Less Wrong
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Possible dangers of thinking you're living in a story:
Believing that if you're right and/or virtuous, you're going to win
Underestimating the power and usefulness of large organizations
Believing that what you're doing is the main story.
Of course, this is assuming that the story you think you're in is a certain kind of popular fiction.
If you thought that you were living in a realistic/naturalistic story, you'd be underestimating your chance of making a significant difference. I have no idea what thinking you were living in a tragedy would do to your presuppositions.
After Douglas Adams' death, I read a fair number of tributes which said his books had a large emotional effect-- people absorbed the attitude of expecting things to be absurd. I don't know what effect that's had on their lives.
More:
(Most of these are more accurately described as "errors almost everyone makes all the time" than "dangers of thinking you're in a story", but thinking of them that way seems pretty useful for identifying them.)
Edit: After reading this comment, I'll amend that to "Assuming villainy is the usual explanation for apparent bad behaviour."
So what is villainy, if it's not that?
They mean well, rather than being out to deliberately fuck you up.
This is so common as to be an adage: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor)
I don't know if you have peasant ancestry, especially peasants living in a non- or partially-democratic society; I do, and when I talked to my grandparents and granduncles, as a young boy raised on hero stories and supported by his family, I was struck by how tremendously fatalistic their outlook on life was. While they worked hard and smart, and aimed at steadily improving their lot in life (and, eventually, succeeded - my father was able to get an engineering degree), the idea that they were and would always be part of the background scenery of history was very fixed in their mind; no matter how proud they were of their debt-free house and comfortable retirement money, they never even considered that it might be possible for them to be concerned about matters beyond their family's immediate needs - that was "gentlemen's stuff", while they were but "poor people".
To cut short, my point is that that type of literature is called "Realism" or "Naturalism" for a reason - because to a significant degree, and especially when compared with Romantic literature, that was actually how nineteenth-century peasants thought and lived (and not just peasants, I believe - Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch deals with the middle class but it's one of the most depressing novels I've ever read). The answer to your question is in those books themselves.
That's interesting. My background is various Russian and eastern European Jewish, and the default assumption seems to be that you can build a decent life, but playing on the larger stage just isn't thought of. It's not even viewed as "gentlemen's stuff", it's just a blank spot.
If you don't mind, I'll post your comment above to my livejournal-- at this point, I'd like to get more people's take on their family culture and ambition.
Sure, no problem.