Our young impressionable minds can't help but apply parts of the fiction to reality, it makes us paint ourselves a picture of the future we imagine, the future we hope for.
The problem with the fiction we grew up with is of course that it was made in the past. The youth books we read in the nineties were written by some author in his thirties remembering how it was to grow up in the seventies. From the beginning, our picture of the future was painted on a dusty old canvas, with used and dry paint. We spend the rest of our lives watching the flakes of colour fall off the canvas and find ourselves having to fill the holes in with new paint.
That our childhood vision of the future is incorrect is of course a very obvious fact. But at some point even the most evident questions must be asked out loud. That is how humans transmit information, after all. However, people are oftentimes afraid to ask the obvious, we fear ridicule and mockery. We all need someone to whom we could end even the most self-explanatory statement with "Right?" Without anyone to verify our logic, we would have no grip left on reality.
I digress.
My point is that even though we spend our adult lives replacing the fiction of youth with the facts of life, we wouldn't be able to get there without the initial fantasy. If we didn't have the crumbling picture from our childhood, we wouldn't know where to fill in the paint and there would be nowhere to start.
