Nick Cave

Choosing Wonder Over a Shrinking Reality

Because humans interpret experience through narrative, the difference Cave describes often shows up in the stories we tell ourselves. Viktor Frankl’s *Man’s Search for Meaning* (1946) argues that suffering becomes more bearable when placed within a framework of purpose, while meaninglessness intensifies despair. Cave’s “dream” resembles this generative storytelling: it grants texture to life without denying hardship. In turn, when we “reason” the world into emptiness, we may be adopting a story of futility—one that treats joy as naïveté and reduces aspiration to error, until the narrative itself becomes a self-fulfilling atmosphere. [...]