Choices

Something like 98% of fiction is about people choosing to do not what is reasonable and sensible, but what is extraordinary and reckless. About 10% of the time, even in fiction, those who make that choice fail. But, then, they personally feel that it was worth having tried, despite the fact that they failed. In the rare case when people do make the reasonable and sensible choices in their lives in fiction, they often regret having done so.

About 95% of the time, in real life, people do what is reasonable and sensible, sometimes contentedly and sometimes while living lives of quiet desperation. Most of the time, in real life, when they do not make the reasonable and sensible choices, they fail. Most of the time, in real life, when they do fail, they regret their choice, unless that choice involved having children, which almost no one ever admits, even to themselves, that they regret. This isn't just because people deceive themselves. It is genuinely true that almost no one regrets having had children once they have children, no matter how much this changes their lives.

Reasonable and sensible, apparently, require no fictional cheerleaders. Or, perhaps, this issue selection bias. The people who write fiction did something extraordinary and reckless and prospered and assume that this in normal. They can't understand why other people didn't make the same choices that they did and try to win them over.