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Reading Palahniuk doesn't make you feel good about yourself. You don't become a better person having read his works. Your life becomes no more significant than it was before, necessarily.
It's like looking at Picasso's works. You don't admire them for their beauty. They don't show that you have a true appreciation of art. Or abstract even.
These men, their works, inspire. And not in the, "I'm going somewhere," "I can achieve greatness," "the world is my canvas," sort of way. But in a way more subtle. They challenge you to think. To look back at all that is crooked and easily undefined or more commonly over-defined.
Palahniuk, like Picasso, is giving you another approach to observing, to viewing. To thinking. To appreciating. To approaching life. He takes your world and, with words, tears it apart from the seams. He realizes all vantage points and selectively adheres new perspective to parts/people/places you already know.
And he is not doing it for you. He just does it because he can. If he knew that not a single person would read it, he would probably still write it anyway. Because he is a writer. Because that is what he does. Because he thought it. Or knew it. Or figured it out. And even if he weren't guaranteed readers, in written form, it would at least have the potential to be read. Even if just by himself again, years down the road.
How selfish would we be to keep our thoughts to ourselves? To keep our epiphanies, our revelations, our discoveries limited to those who epiphanized, revolutionized, discovered.
Still- How selfish would we be to expect that someone actually cared about every thought that we've had? Or any? Any epiphanies, any revelations, any discoveries. They may have seemed significant to us but why do we care if or hope that someones else learns of/from them?
Even the diary of Anne Frank, presumably written for her own eyes, is shared and studied and applied to modern day morals, philosophies, history lessons, etc.

la vie en film

I've been thinking for a while now, maybe a couple years or so, about trying to pinpoint beautiful experiences and trying to capture them in memory and trying to pass them on to the world. In sketches. In stories. In some sort of artistic expression. I have been searching for the right blend of experiences and related descriptions to deem worthy of one's reading. Years later, I am ashamed to admit that I have realized or perhaps been convinced that even the best of descriptions for the best of moments are still just copies of copies.
Thank you Chuck Palahniuk for taking my beauty, my insight, my loves, my memories straight out of my hippocampus and throwing them all into the metaphorical trash. Nothing that has happened to me hasn't happened to everyone else. No experience is unique.
I think back to the time when a boyfriend of mine would surprise me by dancing to nothing but the beat of our own footsteps. At the moment, I was mystified and surprised. I was so sure that the story of our love could be summed up in the few short minutes we spent closer to each other than the rest of the world had ever been. Closer to each other than anyone in the rest of the world could ever try to be. It made me feel beautiful and unique. Loved and special enough to spend the time and spontaneity on. And then I saw the same scene re-enacted for the world to see in a movie. Only it was different characters and it was in the middle of a road somewhere. And you could see her smile and you could see the passion in his eyes. And, although they were dancing to silence, there was a soundtrack for us to hear because it was after-all a movie.
The thing about movies though, is that you can see all the characters and even when the characters have a flashback, the scene includes all of them even the one whose mind is supposedly having the flashback. You get to see just how beautiful, just how in love all of the characters are/were. You get to see how the love in their eyes makes them that much more beautiful for just that moment. But the thing about real life is you are never going to be able to see what everyone else sees in the way that you feel. The love you held in your eyes only counts to the one who saw it and it only counts for that moment. You can never recreate that beauty or that moment because you couldn't see it from all angles.
And why would you want to? We say we want special and unique experiences but we're addicted to happiness the way a masochist is addicted to suffering. After having that one glorified, defining moment we can't wait for the next to come along. After all, if we were only due that one glorified, defining moment, what reason would we have to live for after it? So we try again.
We keep dancing in the silence hoping to feel that passion, hoping to recreate that moment. Little do we realize that the moment was 'special' because it was spontaneous and unprecedented. But, with the limited creative potential this modern world holds, it is hard, maybe impossible even, to continue creating spontaneous moments so we get sucked in to the hum-drum daily grind of real life. And we start living in movies and books because those copies of copies are unique to us and make us feel alive.