I recently started reading Government Cheese by Steven Pressfield. I know Pressfield from The War of Art and Turning Pro — books about creative resistance, discipline, the unglamorous work of showing up. I expected more of that. Stoic wisdom in a new wrapper.
What I didn’t expect was how much I’d enjoy the misery.
Government Cheese is a memoir about a guy wracked by guilt, paralyzed by self-doubt, drifting through years of failure on his way to becoming a writer. It’s not motivational in any obvious sense. It’s seedy. It’s lonely. The man eats government-issued cheese and sleeps in his car.
And I couldn’t put it down.
It reminded me of the same feeling I get reading Bukowski — that pull toward the ugly, the raw, the stubbornly honest. The same thing that made me tear through Hunter S. Thompson, Hemingway, and Palahniuk. Stories about people living on the edge of ruin, and somehow finding meaning — or at least a good sentence — in the wreckage.
I started wondering why.
Not just why I enjoy it. Why it feels good. Why a story about a desperate man failing at life can feel more nourishing than a hundred self-help books telling me I can have it all.
The flight simulator in your skull
Turns out, there’s science behind the pull.
Keith Oatley, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, spent decades studying what fiction does to the brain. His conclusion: reading fiction works as a flight simulator for social and emotional experience. The same way a pilot trains for engine failure without actually crashing, readers rehearse difficult emotions — grief, fear, shame, moral confusion — without real-world consequences.
His research with Raymond Mar found that fiction readers consistently score higher on empathy tests, even after controlling for personality. Nonfiction readers showed no such benefit. It’s not just that empathetic people read more fiction. Fiction appears to actually build the muscle.
Dark fiction, specifically, seems to build it faster. Because the scenarios are more extreme, the emotional workout is more intense. You’re not simulating a pleasant dinner party. You’re simulating survival.
Your brain on Bukowski
Paul Zak’s neuroscience lab discovered something strange about sad stories. When subjects watched an emotionally intense narrative — a father with a terminally ill son — their brains released both cortisol (stress, attention) and oxytocin (empathy, connection) simultaneously. That cocktail made people more generous afterward, not less. They donated significantly more to charity than people who watched a neutral version of the same characters.
Dark stories don’t desensitize us. They open us up.
There’s also a concept called benign masochism, coined by psychologist Paul Rozin. It describes the pleasure we get from negative experiences we know can’t actually hurt us — spicy food, horror movies, the novels of Hubert Selby Jr. The body’s alarm system fires, the conscious mind recognizes safety, and the override itself becomes the reward. A small private victory: I can handle this.
Rozin found the sweet spot sits just below each person’s threshold of tolerance. The saddest story you love best is about as sad as you can stand. That’s why some people read Raymond Carver and others need Cormac McCarthy. Same mechanism, different thermostat setting.
Why men especially
Here’s where it gets personal.
Men, broadly speaking, read less fiction than women. But when we do read, we tend toward exactly this territory — adventure, horror, thrillers, stories of alienation and solitary struggle. A study at Queen Mary, University of London, asked men to name the books that meant most to them. The answers were dominated by Camus, Salinger, and Hemingway. Books about disconnection. Books about being alone in a world that doesn’t quite make sense.
The women in the parallel study named books about passion and connection.
There’s a psychological theory behind this. Ronald Levant calls it normative male alexithymia — a fancy name for something simple: boys are socialized out of emotional expression. Not all the way, not every boy, but enough that many men struggle to identify and articulate what they feel. Levant’s research shows that baby boys are actually more emotionally expressive than baby girls. By age six, they’ve learned to shut it down.
Dark fiction offers a back door. When I read about Pressfield sleeping in his car, paralyzed by shame, I’m accessing emotions I might not sit with voluntarily. But the masculine coding of the story — a tough guy enduring hardship — makes it safe. It’s not therapy. It’s not journaling. It’s a Bukowski novel with a whiskey on the nightstand, and nobody’s asking me to talk about my feelings.
The fiction provides the feeling. The genre provides the permission.
Maybe life isn’t about winning
There’s another layer, though. One thing science can’t fully explain.
Reading Government Cheese, I found myself thinking: this man suffered enormously for years, failed repeatedly, lived in poverty and shame, and still became Steven Pressfield. Still wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, and The War of Art. His worst years became his best material.
That’s inspirational, sure. But it’s more than that.
It made me wonder whether the measuring stick is wrong. Whether success and admiration are the point at all. Or whether a life full of stories — good ones, terrible ones, the kind you’d be embarrassed to tell at dinner — is what actually makes a life worth living.
I’m not in a desperate place. Not sleeping in my car. Not eating government cheese. But I’ve had my share of the abyss. And reading about someone else’s — really reading it, feeling it — does something no amount of positive affirmation can do. It reminds me that everyone’s life is a long chain of temporary disasters, relieved by short intermissions of calmer winds.
And a 2020 study gave this some unexpected teeth: Coltan Scrivner at the University of Chicago found that horror fans and people with high morbid curiosity showed significantly less psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fans of apocalyptic fiction — zombie movies, pandemic thrillers — reported better preparedness and greater resilience. They’d already rehearsed the end of the world. When it sort of arrived, they were less surprised.
Dark stories don’t just feel good. They prepare you.
Sources:
Neuroscience & Psychology of Storytelling
Paul J. Zak, “Why Inspiring Stories Make Us React: The Neuroscience of Narrative,” Cerebral Cortex, 2015. — The cortisol-oxytocin study with the father-son narrative.
Melanie C. Green & Timothy C. Brock, “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000. — Foundational narrative transportation research.
Paul Rozin et al., “Glad to Be Sad, and Other Examples of Benign Masochism,” Judgment and Decision Making, 2013. — The benign masochism framework.
Fiction, Empathy & the Flight Simulator Theory
Keith Oatley, “Fiction: Simulation of Social Worlds,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2016. — Fiction as social-emotional flight simulator.
Raymond A. Mar, Keith Oatley & Jordan B. Peterson, “Exploring the Link Between Reading Fiction and Empathy,” Communications, 2009. — Fiction readers and empathy scores.
Dark Fiction & Resilience
Coltan Scrivner et al., “Pandemic Practice: Horror Fans and Morbidly Curious Individuals Are More Psychologically Resilient During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Personality and Individual Differences, 2021.
Gender & Reading Preferences
Lisa Jardine & Annie Watkins, “Men’s Reading Habits” study, Queen Mary, University of London, 2007. — The alienation vs. connection finding.
Ronald F. Levant, “The New Psychology of Men,” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 1996. — Normative male alexithymia hypothesis.
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