In times of overwhelming stress of our realities, we don't always cry and shout our frustrations. Sometimes, we tend to reimagine life using our own terms. We stop our chores, lock ourselves in our rooms, and indulge in a distorted version of reality. Sometimes, we want to experience surreal things. Wouldn't it be nice to deviate our mindset sometimes?
What would happen if someone knocks on our door and says that we won the lottery? What if we meet our soulmate as we walk to school, but only to understand our destiny after some years together? What if we can actually read minds or teleport like the main characters of our games? How about making a time machine that can transport our letters to the past? Or simply, how about we don't need to do chores for one whole day and we can just read or play or have fun?
Escapism is not only about running away. Escapism is more about creating the kind of reality we would want to be in—which makes us leave the real problem and not confronting it. We engineer a fantasy that fits our ideals. Not necessarily a world without hardships, but a world where we can conquer anything, because we created the world. One thing to note is that escapism is a normal human behavior and is not a mental disorder per se.
No matter how rational or strong we think we are, there are or will be moments when we do not or will not want to confront our problems, just run away from them. It's nice if we are deviating from just a mundane life, like Belle wishing there must me more than her provincial life. But, what if we have a real problem, such as overwork, or poverty, or unwanted marriage. Our escapist behaviors kicking in seem like warm hugs, don't they?
If we just drown in fantasy then sleep, we can dream of nice things, as we like them to be. We can daydream that we marry some ideal person and we would be saved for all our remaining lifetime. Well, escapism takes many forms. It's not just lucid dreaming or daydreaming. People say alcohol cannot solve problems, but it can make you forget them, even for a night. We also drown ourselves in music sometimes, to negate all other external and internal distractions. We binge-watch drama series to divert our attention from the lack of protagonist events in our real life.
Indulging in memes to experience happiness is a form of escapism. You're lucky if you're looking at memes for mere entertainment. There are people who view memes as tiny hands holding them up, keeping them from falling off the cliff of depression. It depends on intention.
It makes us feel better, but it does not solve anything, perhaps more than subtle ways such as clearing our minds or diverting our attention for a while. But for the bigger part, nothing is fixed. In the end, we go back to our mundane life. We still need actual solutions. But sometimes, it feels better to just escape than solve. It's not right and we know it, but we just can't help but lean to our escapist behaviors. As the saying goes, we have a choice of fight or flight. And we wonder why we choose flight.
You also might have heard of isekai 異世界, which literally means "different world", or a parallel universe. We like isekai stories because they give the protagonist a chance to restart life in another world or timeline. It crosses our minds: what if we were reborn in another dimension—would we be able to live a better life away from our current sufferings?
Children and adolescent are also prone to regression. If you have heard of the term chuunibyou 中二病 (eighth-grader syndrome), these kids live out their fantasies by actually acting like fictional characters, doing unusual moves or speaking unusual words, or telling stories of things that don't happen in real life. We can note that they have already convinced themselves that they are "different from their surroundings" because that's exactly what they want. I myself have been through that. (Actually, sometimes, I still am.)
On other more extreme cases, a terminally ill person might also refuse all treatment and just travel the world without regrets, which is also a form of escapism. A child in a breaking family would want to just run away instead of fixing the war (which is the adults' responsibility). A burned-out worker might want to just leave a company even if they love the job so much, instead of talking it out with their bosses. Street children who got tired of being driven away for asking alms might succumb to inhalants to escape their hunger, since they might think no one cares about them anyway. It is also common for depressed people turn to sleeping pills (and overdose on them) especially if they have found solace in their dreams.
You see, escapism has a lot of forms in all sorts of people. While escapism is natural, it can be categorized as either a behavior or a trait. Even if escapism is habitual, it doesn't mean that it's bad.
However, some behaviors are destructive, such as constant absentmindness. Any kind of behavior, whether good or bad, can develop into traits. When escapism becomes habitual, the greatest challenge is to keep anchored to reality so that we can always go back safely no matter how far we fare. Destructive behaviors are already hard to deal with ; what more if they become habitual, or become part of the personality.
For example, conscious addiction is normally paired with escapism. A student who has recently discovered the fun of gaming might intentionally find or make ways to avoid school just to play. He/She/They might pretend to be sick, play all night long in order to actually be sick in the morning, or even leave the house but take a detour to the game center instead.
Some people have extreme escapist behaviors that they even exert effort to skip their therapy or mentoring sessions. Sometimes, they don't just find ways to avoid therapy, but actually pull strings to prevent it from happening, such as intentionally catching a cold or exercising too much in order to sprain an ankle. There are even people who refuse to be counseled.
In other cases, a person who was once saved by a lie might tend to lie again and again to suit the situation. The person might develop a trait, which is as "lying as much as breathing". What's more dangerous is if the person breached the thin line of truth and lie, and fully convince him/herself that the lie is true, and he/she therefore becomes honestly unable to return. This is not just dangerous to the lie detector machine, but also to the person him/herself and the people around.
Escapism is a normal behavior, until we push it to the extreme.
Escapism is basically a method of setting aside the overwhelming reality and just stepping out to a fantasy we model as we like. It's just that. The difference lies on how strong our grasp of ourselves is.
Artists, writers, poets, songwriters, and other creative careers use escapism like a tool to transport themselves into various situations that don't really happen in their lives. It doesn't really have to be too fictional. It can just be a technically-possible scenario—it just so happened that they don't experience it. See, they make the best art, even so surreal that their fantasies transcend to us audience. Escapism can be observed, learned, mastered and be used for good.
Escapism is a method to discover things. If we live in our respective reality all through our lives, we will never get to experience things outside of the box. Sometimes, we need to cue our "What if"s, so we can see what we lack and what we are abundant of. So we can see where we are wrong and where we are right. So we can see how much more we can improve, or if a career suits us better than our present one, or if we can solve a problem through a different method than what we are used to. More than creating just "a fantasy", we are creating a fantasy tailored to our expectations, knowledge, circumstances and experiences. Therefore, our fantasy is something capable of making us better, rather than just a mediocre way to get out of a mundane life for the sake of getting out.
The higher our level of understanding of ourselves, the better we are at managing our insecurities. It's like if you know how to manage your resources well at your richest times, you also know how to manage your resources well at your poorest times. Not that rich and poor equal to good and bad, but just two extremes of a straight line.
Our fantasies are just a product of our realities, too. Reality is overwhelming, which is exactly why we escape. Fantasies can never outgrow our realities. The problem lies with us losing our grip to the reality, that we get caught away in the stream of our illusions.
One useful way to strengthen our grip to reality is practicing mindfulness. Yes, meditation. Noting the surroundings and accepting them as they are. Clearing unnecessary emotions. Relieving stress, physically, from head to toe. Flushing out stress through imagining it like a smoke coming out of the body.
Meditation is a key tool for healthy and happy living. That's another topic to discuss as well. This blog is aimed to discuss escapism and raise awareness on what it is, what it does, and how it can affect our lives. I hope you stay tuned for updates.
Going back, yes, reality sometimes sucks. But that's our reality—we have no choice but to suck it up. Defense mechanism as natural, yes—as natural as our positive coping mechanisms. We need to accept that escapism is part of our human psychology. Then, it's up to us what we want to do with it. Do we want to succumb to it, or do we want to leverage it to make our lives more creative and fun?
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