Same here I guess its an old guy thing? I used read a lot of fiction, but since my 30s I’ve been almost 100% non-fiction, of which I read a lot. Though I still watch fiction TV and movies (though my tolerance for anything remotely dark or challenging has gone way way down)
I read very little fiction but I also watch way more fictional TV and film than I watch documentaries or news. I like seeing actors act out a characterization more than I like imagining it based on a written description. I learn better by reading than watching.
My mother said this often. She enjoyed TV and movies but she fundamentally didn’t understand why anyone would read a novel. She was an engineer with almost no sense of imagination. She talked about how people would see things in the clouds and she didn’t get it, even as a kid. “It’s a cloud. I see a cloud.” When I presented her with stories she would genuinely question, “This didn’t happen, did it? So what is the point?”
It was quite a twist that she had a creative writer for a daughter. To her credit, she always supported my interests, she just didn’t share them.
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that more concrete thinking and less abstract thinking could be an indication that person is autistic. I don’t think my Mom was autistic, but she was an engineer, and there’s a lot of overlap. Come to think of it, my grandfather, who is an autistic engineer, never showed the slightest interest in anything fictional, except one movie: Office Space. I don’t remember how we got him watching that, but he thought it was hysterical.
Though I actually find reading fiction more stressful than reading non-fiction (particularly history books, which is my non-fiction choice), even if its not particularly pleasant subject matter (to a point, I’m not reading books about genocide, or true crime murder descriptions)
May I ask what kind of engineer.
Mechanical. She got a degree and worked for a few years as an engineer but she ended up leaving the field due to rampant sexism. This was the 80s.
My grandfather never had a formal degree but he worked his way through various engineering jobs and ended up doing very important stuff for an energy company. This was back before you had to have a degree to get a good job. He was obsessed with power stations and how energy works, but he also threw himself into early computing. He basically learned everything there was to know about power companies and acted as a consultant to high-level executives who didn’t really understand it. He’s also obsessed with working on cars and fixing computers. His job is one of the few things he can talk about at length. It was his whole life for a long time. No friends, just work.
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Great quote from a great book!
Pfft. It’s not even real. There was no Hill House and certainly haunting isn’t real.
I started studying mechanical engineering. I dropped it and threw myself into computers. Well, basically fell back asswards. Done very well.
It’s interesting. I see mechanical engineering as documentaries/hard science. But I see programming/DB design as a type of fiction. I’m a GIS applications engineer now.
Really, it could go either way. Both, and most professions are “Can we do this?”
I thought it was just me - but somewhere in my 30s, I lost my taste for fiction. I might still read 1 or 2 novels a year - but that’s out of over 100 books. It used to be closer to 50% novels. Still watch TV and movie fiction , although even with those, I watch more documentaries than I used to.
Yes, maybe lack of imagination is a poor way of putting it. Dealing with abstraction. The ability to read a story and pull from it the insights the might apply to your own life, or to see the world through someone else’s eyes and understand the value in that. I always understand myself better through the fiction I write, it’s how I can make my subconscious visible. And I read fiction to explore things about the world I never thought about before. Or ways people can be that I never considered.
I have an engineering friend who is highly creative, she writes fiction and does arts and crafts and is into everything. I suspect she is autistic as well. So you can’t generalize too much.
ETA: I have a friend who sometimes attends movie nights. I made him sit through my favorite movie, I Heart Huckabee’s. A VERY abstract film. At the end he said, “What did we just watch?”
I explained to him that it’s about empathy and connection as the fundamental response to life’s meaninglessness.
At which point he said, “Why not just say that, then?”
I mean I don’t know how to answer that. It’s about the journey and experiencing change along with the character. But really I couldn’t explain why storytelling is better.
Agreed. And I would extend that much further than just documentaries. Every “reality” show of every stripe is fictional. A large segment of science programs are so inaccurate that they may as well be fictional. TV news contains so much selection bias that it presents a fictional view of the world. And so on.
At least my fiction is clearly labeled as such. Not so much the fiction that pretends to be otherwise.
Someone else here who read a lot of fiction when young but lost interest in it sometime in my thirties (I guess). Seems to be quite a trend. I’ll occasionally watch fiction on TV. I think for me it may be a suspension of disbelief thing.
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I think that might be a step too far. There’s a wide range of “normal” without getting into labels. A lack of ability to imagine anything, or to take everything literally, may be a flag for autism, but the person who simply has little or no interest in fiction may simply have different tastes.
I also find I’ve lost a lot of interest in more abstract weird TV and movies. Not completely, but I have far less patience for “weird for the sake of weird.” I need and plot and characters I find interesting, if I get that the film can abstract and surreal as you like. But if its all subtext and allegory with nothing actually happening its just self indulgent tripe by the filmmaker IMO (I’ve not seen I Heart Huckabees so I’ve no idea where on the weird spectrum it falls). Whereas I’d happily sit through something like that when I was younger (the fact I smoked weed when I was younger might have something to do with that 
) .
Any dopers out there looking for a subject for their sociology/english-lit Phd?
Of people I personally know, I’d say 1 in 20 are like that, and another 1 in 10 are close to it but not quite so extreme.
Thank you. It’s also very interesting (and unexpected) that many people here report the preference for nonfiction increasing with age.
The people I know with the absolute preference vary widely in age and profession - one musician in their twenties, one geography teacher in their late 30s-early 40s, two pensioners in their 70s, a financier and an auto mechanic.