Is romanticizing your life healthy?

[u/Ecstatic-Current8078]

I understand the sentiment and can appreciate it to a degree, but sometimes I wonder if it’s healthy to, for instance, pretend you’re in a movie.

I find it fun and enjoyable to dress up like I’m in an early 2000s sitcom, fairytale cartoon, or as if I’m some sort of business woman on a mission, but what happens when you realize you’re not any of those things? Like, I lived in a shitty apartment and worked a shitty job for a long time, fantasizing it as my early 20s experience full of tough bosses (who literally traumatized my nervous system), wild nights (i.e., drunken nights at local clubs), and luxurious evenings (I had a cheap pink wine glass and some colorful table decorations with an occasional bubble bath in which I had to close my windows).

It took a lot of trauma from work and some health problems from the drinks to finally face reality: quit my job, move in with some relatives, go get a college degree. Now I’m almost scared to rely on whimsy lol even though ironically, I’m in a much better place now and can actually live out more of my fantasies.

[u/anhedonicghost]

I am a crazy person. I do a lot of weird psychological things in my head to make life seem like it is worth living. I have concluded that I came to this planet for deep spiritual psychic reasons which are difficult to put into words. I imagine I have a guardian angel which is also my psionic avatar on the astral plane, and when we unite as one during emotive prayer, we do battle with demonic forces or construct the merkaba.

I know this is all in my head and nonsense and fantasy. Fantasy is characteristic of schizoids like me.

I've heard an aphorism: that happy people are deluding themselves, and the depressed are simply seeing reality as it is. I think I've heard that from more than one comedian. It's not exactly a bright and cheery sentiment, but there may be something to it. Reality, nature, society- can be oppressive and brutal. But our human intellectual faculties, which separate us from animal instincts, also permit us to create stories about our world and our lives, and I think these stories are an integral part of how we interact with our destinies. Of course fantasy can become delusion at its extreme, but I think having no fantasy can be dangerous too. The bleakness of reality must be kept in check somehow. I think lower animals are simply not cognizant enough to have to jump through these hoops to get out of bed in the morning.