Life isn't a movie, so don't treat it like one.

Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.
― Martin Scorsese

Why do we love movies?
There are a thousand answers to that; most of them are right. It could be the falseness. Or the grandeur. Or maybe because they're a reflection of what we wished our lives were like. We get pleasure watching these "cinematic moments", knowing they totally wouldn't work out in real life.

The harsh truth is there's no background music, no good screenplay, and definitely no easy way to a happy ending.

We're well aware of all of this. But we expect it anyway. Which makes us work so hard to get a big movie moment; only for it to last five minutes at most, or never come at all?

Whether we're aware or not, we all wish our lives were filmic. Because of this "goal", we don't even realize how hard we push ourselves to get this so-called "perfect cinematic sequence" in our lives.

But that's not what life is.

Real life is quieter, greyer, messier and way less aesthetic. Striving for something unrealistic makes us expect too much from a normal situation, and we just end up getting disappointed with what we have now. Most of us crave intensity, not stability. And it's not a bad thing either, because the best motto to base your life on is 'you only live once'.

But craving intensity isn't the best thing either. It just leads to bigger disappointments later in life.

What we see in cinema isn't the big picture. It's just bits and pieces of false plotlines that are convenient to script and screenplay. This isn't hate directed at cinema. Cinema isn't lying to us. We've just started mistaking the language of cinema for the language of life. We're blind to the real point of it. It's only enjoyment, not a lifestyle.

It's just dialogues no one would ever say in real life, and colors no one will see.

The big picture is lost in these interpretations. They try to make "raw" and "realistic" movies about real-world problems. But movies attempt to portray reality because they still can't package the harsh reality into a story. A movie about a struggling single mother can be powerful and beautifully made. But the audience experiences her struggle through two hours of carefully selected scenes, dialogue, music, cinematography and resolution. Real suffering doesn't come with a convenient structure and time skip.

This is just one of the many stereotypes incorporated in films. People watch gritty, dark-filtered movies, applaud them, give them Oscars, and then forget about the message, which was the whole reason the movie was made.

What awareness is this providing us? When people crown these movies for being realistic, considering they still cannot compare to what they actually go through.

Now if you say this to anyone, they'd probably say, "It's just a movie, no one's taking it seriously."

But the problem is, they are. People diminish their lives watching movies, their minds clouded by this need for something. They don't stop and see what they have. Even at their lowest, a movie would just remind them of a life of privilege and love they do not have now.

Cinema is art. Not life. You enjoy art and feel it. But you don't wish you were in the art.

Life isn't something you can just fast-forward. The "scenes" we're tempted to skip are the ones worth living.