Stories and books, you may hate reading, you may love it, regardless - they’re everywhere. Every life is a story, no matter how boring. If you’ve played a video game, that tells a story. Stories don’t only make things interesting; they’re also detrimental to your mind. Most people have read a story in their lives, whether it was in a newspaper, a novel, an internet article, or a textbook at school. Books and stories are records for history, of times and events that took place, which we did not personally witness. We learn about other times in existence that we may not have known about without books. Books are detrimental to our everyday lives.

Reading is everywhere…the news; social media in particular spreads mass amounts of depressing and upsetting news, but it also spreads good news.

First, Let’s discuss…

DEVELOPMENT
Books help us develop mentally, as well as enriching our cognitive (or perceptive) development. As said in one article from education.com
“…it [reading] offers them the opportunity to develop skills that will be used in future academic contexts such as inference (predicting what will happen next in a story), narrative skills (understanding the concept of story-telling), as well as memory skills. As an additional benefit, reading helps them view social behavior objectively and compare it to their own, which develops pragmatic and interpersonal skills.”
- http://www.education.com/question/books-enrich-cognitive-development/

And the earlier you start reading, the better developed these skills can be.
Another article on Scientific Learning.com talks even more in depth about the development and use of our brain in reading.
“We begin to develop the language skills required for reading right from the first gurgles we make as babies. The sounds we encounter in our immediate environment as infants set language acquisition skills in motion, readying the brain for the structure of language-based communication, including reading.
Every time a baby hears speech, the brain is learning the rules of language that generalize, later, to reading.  Even a simple nursery rhyme can help a baby's brain begin to make sound differentiations and create phonemic awareness, an essential building block for reading readiness. By the time a child is ready to read effectively, the brain has done a lot of work coordinating sounds to language, and is fully prepared to coordinate language to reading, and reading to comprehension.
The reading brain can be likened to the real-time collaborative effort of a symphony orchestra, with various parts of the brain working together, like sections of instruments, to maximize our ability to decode the written text in front of us:
• The temporal lobe is responsible for phonological awareness and decoding/discriminating sounds.
• The frontal lobe handles speech production, reading fluency, grammatical usage, and comprehension, making it possible to understand simple and complex grammar in our native language.
• The angular and supramarginal gyrus serve as a "reading integrator" a conductor of sorts, linking the different parts of the brain together to execute the action of reading.  These areas of the brain connect the letters c, a, and t to the word cat that we can then read aloud.”

Practicing the reading skill creates physical changes in the brain as it builds new connections and strengthens the neural pathways, specifically in the areas of reading. After just eight weeks of use, weak readers developed the brain activity patterns that resemble those of strong readers.  And, as brain patterns change, significant improvements for word reading, decoding, reading comprehension and language functions are also observed.

http://www.scilearn.com/blog/the-reading-brain

Let’s start talking about…

EMOTION
Our minds are complex and need a lot of different things; nutrients, protection – and information. In order to expand our knowledge and progress our technology positively we need a way of record keeping – so far to date, that method has been written; which means we need to read. We also need expression and release, books and stories – reading in general are great ways to do just that.

“Being a writer myself, I just enjoy forming the story in my head and adding as I go. I know I’m creating something, a book, something people like myself will enjoy. I write to make art with words on paper in a way that people who read them can imagine the situation like a movie in their head; a book in which people can get something from it that isn’t available for them in real life – within the pages. The audience finds themselves living in the parts of someone else’s story; maybe even imagine themselves being as great as the character, because those stories could never happen to them in their lifetime.

For me, writing stories is an empathetic mechanism. I can take unfathomable and nearly impossible situations and put them down in words with a character that - in the readers’ eyes - can be perfect in every way shape and form. I give people a supplement of emotion and feeling they may not be able to get from their own lives. In a way, I am a doctor for those who cannot find the happiness they need, providing passion and ferocity that people can’t see in themselves already.” – my essay

“Money is numbers and numbers never end. If it takes money to be happy, your search for happiness will never end.”
~BOB MARLEY

One book, Fahrenheit 451 portrays a story of the importance of books and stories, and states several important points about happiness, and the point of life, along with the influence that books have in our everyday lives.
“People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”

Captain Beatty implies that, the contradictions and other ideas that are found in books make certain people upset, or feel offended – they upset people with strong emotional ties, and in many other ways. He implies that books are no fun, not worth time, and pointless While simply not reading anything that offends you might seem like the best solution, getting rid of books completely from our lives was a permanent solution, not only to keep people from being offended by different works, but also to keep other people from thinking and coming up with any more personal thoughts, ideas or perceptions of our world that might also offend others. So in this world, only things that can, and do, make the general public happy are allowed. Beatty sees firemen as the peace-keepers.

Another important point, people cannot form their own personal opinions – due to the fact that people only know what the government wants them to know. As Beatty says,
“Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information.”

Basically, people can only form one “opinion” and every “opinion” is exactly the same because everyone knows the same things. Everyone has the same perspective on everything.
“Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters.” So, authors were seen as evil because they formed new perspective of the world around them, making some people unhappy because of disagreements.

Finally, books have such an immense impact on our relations with other people, Montag has a conversation with his wife Mildred, asking where and when they met. She replies casually that she doesn’t remember…as though it’s like she forgot to do the dishes- as if it just doesn’t matter.
People lack a variety of emotions: they are numb to any sensation other than content and happiness, but if they do feel anything else, it overwhelms them: People have, in this era, never had to deal with or manage their emotions, because they didn’t have any.

While most of the characters are unaware of their lack of person to person communication, Clarisse, a teenage girl known for her “antisocial” behavior, states “No one has time anymore for anyone else” which says a lot about the world that they live in. Throughout her appearance at the beginning of the story she describes how even in schools the classes have become nothing but sports, television, and other activities that lack critical or long term thought. Her “antisocial” behavior, is that she is uninterested with these things and wants to learn more about the world around her instead. Which is quite the opposite of our definition for antisocial, but then again, a word only means the definition you give it.

Montag also starts to think after he asks Mildred about their meeting, he thinks about how if Mildred, his own wife, died that he would not cry. He frustrates himself about how her death to him would be like the death of a stranger. The fact that he has no interpersonal or intimate connections with the woman he married, the one person he was going to spend the rest of his life with.

Montag becomes more and more curious, until he eventually takes a book from a house that was supposed to be burnt. He starts to read the books he has collected over years and years of curiosity. Later on, Montag visits an old man he met in a park once, who was an English Professor before books were outlawed, to try and find the meaning within the books. Faber tells Montag that the books themselves weren’t what was special,

“You’re a hopeless romantic, it would be funny if it were not serious. It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. (…) Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. (…) The magic is only in what the books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe into one garment for us.”
Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what I mean when I say all this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts.
And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more `literary' you are. That's my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

"So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.

The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality. Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth. But when he was held, rootless, in mid-air, by Hercules, he perished easily. If there isn't something in that legend for us today, in this city, in our time, then I am completely insane”

Back on the subject of upsetting news; what we read over everything, news, social media, can be upsetting, but nowadays we know how to handle it; people from the world of Fahrenheit 451 are not used to managing themselves.

People were not meant to live in complete happiness, lack of change is not life. Life has sorrow, if you can feel nothing but factory repeat, cookie-cutter emotion – you are not living, you are only existing.

Fahrenheit 451 gives us a look into what our lives would be like if we also took our right to free thought for granted, making meaningless priorities above it.

Books show us the faults in the way we live, they show us what we need to change, and they give us guidelines to become better.

Without books, we lose so much development within our lives and ourselves. The books were banned, shaping the opinions and perspectives of people to be one uniform way. People took for granted their right to an opinion, and it was taken away. Don’t take books for granted – you need them more than you think.

SOURCES:
http://www.scilearn.com/blog/the-reading-brain
http://www.education.com/question/books-enrich-cognitive-development/
“Fahrenheit 451” – Ray Bradbury