“We need people who can imagine. Fiction builds empathy. It puts you inside someone else’s head. It lets you understand things you don’t get told directly.”
—Neil Gaiman
Dear You,
You’re the one they call idealistic.
Head in the clouds. Too sentimental. Too slow.
You read too much, they say. You feel too much.
You’re the kind of person who gets goosebumps from a well-placed semicolon.
The kind who lingers on a sentence long after the world has moved on.
They call you dreamy—like it’s an insult.
Like dreaming hasn’t been the birthplace of every real thing we now live inside.
But you know better.
You know that stories build bridges where silence once lived.
That a novel can shift your moral compass faster than a debate.
That fiction sharpens the imagination—and imagination is the beginning of everything: innovation, empathy, resistance, design, hope.
You know that someone else’s fantasy often becomes tomorrow’s fact.
So when the world tells you to grow up, to be “practical,”
when it dismisses your softness as weakness,
when it looks at your stack of books and sees only indulgence—
remember this:
Your reading is not retreat. It’s rehearsal.
You are training your mind to stretch, to leap, to sit with nuance, to hold contradiction.
You are learning how to inhabit the lives of others without losing your own.
And that is no small thing.
That is how revolutions start quietly.
So keep reading.
Keep imagining.
Keep being exactly the kind of “unserious” person who might one day rewrite everything.
With admiration,
Meestique
P.S. They laughed at dreamers until they needed one to fix their algorithm. Stay soft. Stay radical.
The Empathic Social Observer 