Our lives are interesting .. to us

The current random quote says:

"Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don't write them down." --W. B. Kinsella

And yet we spend a lot of time posting about our lives, and reading about each other's lives, here in these blogs.

What makes us do this? It's true that maybe the individual details are relatively mundane. We worry about jobs, school, kids, our health. We get annoyed by our families. A lot of things go on in our daily lives that aren't that different from what goes on in the lives of everyone else, except that we all write and angst about wordcounts. But we read (and write) the blogs because we care what happens to each other.

How exactly did that happen though? How do you start caring about a character and what happens to him/her? It seems like a chicken and egg kind of thing, in a lot of ways. You don't care about the details of their lives unless you care about them to begin with. But how do you care about them to begin with if all you have is the details of their lives?

(a lengthy pause to ponder)

So obviously that can't be all there is. The other part is that we also respond to each other's blogs. I care about the people who care about me.

Also, I care about the people whom I can either relate to well because they're going through stuff that I might've gone through before or am going through at the moment.

Or there's some kind of intriguing quirk about them that sparks my imagination. That spark doesn't have to be big. Nobody has to come out with a grand revelation that they're really a dragon from another planet.

Hmmmmm.