Escapism
Based on Wikipedia: Escapism
The usual enemies of escape, C. S. Lewis once observed, are jailers.
It is a sharp little sentence, the kind that lodges in the mind. Lewis meant it partly as a joke, but like most good jokes it carried a serious point. When we condemn escapism, we might ask ourselves: what exactly are we defending? The prison of daily obligation? The grinding repetition of commute and task and sleep? The unrelenting awareness of mortality, of failure, of all the things we cannot fix?
And yet. And yet there is something troubling about the word too. We use it to describe the person who drinks too much, who games until dawn, who loses themselves so thoroughly in fantasy that they forget to live. The jailer might be the enemy of escape, but so too might be the person who never returns from their flight.
This tension—between escape as liberation and escape as avoidance—runs through every human culture and every human life. Understanding it requires us to think carefully about what we are running from, what we are running toward, and whether those two movements are ever truly separate.
The Architecture of Avoidance
At its most basic, escapism is mental diversion from unpleasant aspects of daily life. We escape through activities involving imagination or entertainment. Sometimes we escape simply to occupy ourselves, to fill the void that opens when we sit still with our persistent feelings of depression or general sadness.
This is not new. What is new is the scale.
Entire industries now exist to foster our tendency to remove ourselves from the rigors of daily life. The digital world has become a vast continent of escape, with its streaming services and social media feeds and immersive games and endless scroll. A person could, if they wished, never fully return. Some do not.
But here is where it gets complicated. Many activities that form normal parts of a healthy existence can also become avenues of escapism when taken to extremes or out of proper context. Eating. Sleeping. Exercise. Sexual activity. Each of these is necessary; each can become a hiding place. The line between self-care and self-avoidance is not always clear, even to the person crossing it.
This is why the word escapism often carries a negative connotation. It suggests that escapists are unhappy, that they possess an inability or unwillingness to connect meaningfully with the world, that they refuse to take the necessary actions their lives require. The Oxford English Dictionary captures this skepticism in its definition: "The tendency to seek, or the practice of seeking, distraction from what normally has to be endured."
Note that last word. Endured. It assumes that life is fundamentally something to be suffered through, and that looking away from that suffering is a kind of failure.
But is it?
The Defense of Daydreaming
Many thinkers have pushed back against the idea that escapism is fundamentally and exclusively negative.
Lewis, with his jab about jailers, was one. He considered that used in moderation, escapism could serve both to refresh and to expand the imaginative powers. A tired mind needs rest; a confined mind needs horizons. Fantasy provides both.
His friend J. R. R. Tolkien made a similar argument, though with an interesting qualification. Tolkien defended escapism in fantasy literature as the creative expression of reality within a secondary, imaginative world. When we read about hobbits and elves, we are not fleeing reality; we are seeing it from an angle that makes its contours clearer. The small acts of courage in Middle-earth illuminate the same courage we need in our own lives.
But Tolkien also emphasized that good fantasy required an element of horror. Without danger, without the shadow of real loss, fantasy became what he called "mere escapism"—a thing of cotton and sugar that nourished nothing. The dragon must be real, or slaying it means nothing.
Terry Pratchett, writing decades later, noted that the twentieth century had seen the development of a more positive view of escapist literature. What was once dismissed as frivolous had come to be recognized as necessary. Stories matter. The worlds we imagine shape the world we build.
Beyond literature, music and video games have been valued as artistic media of escape. A piece of music can transport you to a different emotional landscape. A game can give you agency and accomplishment that your real circumstances deny you. These are not small things.
What Freud Understood
Sigmund Freud, for all his controversies, understood something important about human psychology. He considered a quota of escapist fantasy a necessary element in human life.
They cannot subsist on the scanty satisfaction they can extort from reality. "We simply cannot do without auxiliary constructions," Theodor Fontane once said.
Auxiliary constructions. It is a useful phrase. We build scaffolding around our lives, structures of imagination and hope that allow us to keep working on the difficult project of existing. Without them, the project would collapse.
Freud's followers expanded on this idea. They saw rest and wish fulfillment, in small measures, as useful tools in adjusting to traumatic upset. When something terrible happens, the mind needs a place to go. Fantasy provides that place. It is not weakness; it is survival.
Later psychologists highlighted the role of what they called vicarious distractions in shifting unwanted moods, especially anger and sadness. Watching a film or reading a novel can break the cycle of rumination. It gives the emotional system something else to process, creating space for perspective to return.
When Escape Becomes Exile
There is, however, a crucial distinction between visiting a psychic retreat and taking up permanent residence there.
When escape becomes the primary mode of existence, the results are often negative and sometimes pathological. The person who never leaves their fantasy world loses the ability to function in the real one. Skills atrophy. Relationships wither. The fantasy, which began as a comfort, becomes a cage of its own.
Drugs provide one extreme example. Certain mind-altering substances make participants forget the reality of where they are or what they are meant to be doing. The escape is chemical, total, and often devastating. What begins as relief from pain becomes the source of deeper pain.
But chemical escape is not the only kind that can become pathological. Any form of escapism, taken far enough, can cut a person off from their own life. The gambler who cannot stop. The binge-watcher who lets weeks dissolve. The daydreamer who never takes action. Each has found a form of escape that has become a trap.
Bread and Games
Some social critics have worried about escapism from a different angle entirely. They warn of attempts by the powers that control society to provide means of escapism instead of bettering the condition of the people.
This concern is ancient. The Roman poet Juvenal coined the phrase "bread and circuses"—panem et circenses—to describe how rulers kept the populace docile. Give people food and entertainment, and they will not notice that they are being exploited. They will not demand justice because they have been given distraction.
The modern version of this critique points to the entertainment-industrial complex. When people are anxious about the economy, give them superhero movies. When they are angry about inequality, give them reality television. Keep them scrolling, keep them streaming, and they will not organize. They will not revolt.
There is something to this critique, but it can be overstated. The same technologies that provide escape also provide connection and information. The person watching a documentary about injustice is also escaping their daily routine. The distinction between enlightening escape and numbing escape is not always easy to draw.
The Seeds of Something New
The German social philosopher Ernst Bloch offered a more nuanced view of escapism's political significance. He argued that utopias and images of fulfillment, however regressive they might seem, also contained an impetus for radical social change.
Bloch's insight was this: to change the world, we must first imagine it differently. The daydream that seems like mere escapism from the viewpoint of a technological-rational society might actually be a seed for a new and more humane social order.
When a worker fantasizes about a world without exploitation, that fantasy is not just an escape from their current condition. It is also a vision of what could be. It is, in Bloch's words, "an immature, but honest substitute for revolution." The immaturity is in the fantasy's lack of practical program. The honesty is in its recognition that things should be otherwise.
According to Bloch, social justice could not be realized without seeing things fundamentally differently. The imagination of escape, in this view, is not the enemy of action but its prerequisite. Before we can build a better world, we must be able to picture one.
Escapist Societies in Literature
Writers have long been fascinated by societies organized around escape, often as warnings about our own tendencies.
H. G. Wells, in The Time Machine, depicted the Eloi—a race of the far future who have achieved a kind of permanent vacation. They are beautiful and childlike and completely without purpose. They spend their days in languid pleasure, eating fruit and playing in the sunshine. They seem to have escaped all of humanity's struggles.
But Wells reveals the horror beneath this happy lifestyle. The Eloi are cattle. They are farmed by the monstrous Morlocks who live underground, and their blissful ignorance is simply the ignorance of prey that does not understand predation. Their escape from struggle has become a surrender to exploitation. Wells was critiquing capitalism, or at least the class system, showing how the wealthy might escape into comfort while losing everything that made them human.
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 presents a different kind of escapist society. In his future America, books are banned and burned. The populace is pacified with giant wall-sized televisions and "seashell radios"—tiny devices worn in the ear that provide constant entertainment, like permanent earbuds playing an eternal podcast of meaninglessness.
The people in Bradbury's world use these technologies to escape a life of strict regulations and the looming threat of war. But the escape is a trap. By refusing to engage with difficult ideas, they have lost the capacity to think at all. Their escape from discomfort has become an escape from meaning.
The Digital Frontier
In more recent science fiction, escapism is often depicted as an extension of social evolution, with society becoming detached from physical reality and processing into virtual ones.
The 2009 Japanese animated film Summer Wars features Oz, a virtual world so complete that people conduct most of their lives within it. Social interaction, commerce, government services—all happen in a digital space more vivid than the physical world. When Oz is threatened, so is the entire fabric of society.
The American film Gamer, also from 2009, imagines a massively multiplayer online game called Society—a clear play on the real-world game Second Life. Players control real human beings in the game world, blurring the line between avatar and person, between escape and exploitation.
D. J. MacHale's novel The Reality Bug takes the concept to its logical extreme. An entire civilization has abandoned their physical world, leaving it in ruin while they "jump" into their perfect virtual realities. Each person lives in a customized paradise while the actual planet dies. The novel's anti-hero must find a way to make the virtual realities less perfect, to reintroduce enough discomfort that people will choose to return and save their dying world.
The message in these stories is consistent: escape taken too far becomes extinction. A species that flees entirely from reality ceases to have a reality to return to.
Two Kinds of Escape
The Norwegian psychologist Frode Stenseng has developed what he calls a dualistic model of escapism—an attempt to understand why the same activity can be healthy for one person and harmful for another.
Stenseng noticed a paradox. The psychological state known as flow—that condition of total absorption in an activity described by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—closely resembles states obtained through drug abuse, sexual masochism, and even suicidal ideation. All of these involve a loss of self-awareness, a merging with the activity, a temporary escape from the burden of being a separate self.
How can the same psychological mechanism produce both flourishing and destruction?
Stenseng's answer is that there are two forms of escapism with different outcomes, depending on the motivation behind them.
The first form he calls self-suppression. This is escapism that stems from motives to run away—to flee from unpleasant thoughts, self-perceptions, and emotions. The person engaging in self-suppressive escape is trying to not be themselves. They are hiding from their own inner life.
The second form he calls self-expansion. This is escapism that stems from motives to gain positive experiences and to discover new aspects of the self. The person engaging in self-expansive escape is trying to become more themselves. They are using the activity to grow.
Stenseng developed what he calls the "escape scale" to measure these two dimensions in people's favorite activities, whether sports, arts, gaming, or anything else. His research has shown that the two types of escapism have distinctly different effects on well-being. Self-expansion tends to improve mood and life satisfaction. Self-suppression tends to correlate with anxiety and depression.
Interestingly, some individuals are more prone to engage through one type of escapism than the other, suggesting a stable personality difference. But situational factors also matter. When a person is already feeling bad, they are more likely to engage in self-suppressive escape. When they are feeling relatively good, they are more likely to engage in self-expansive escape.
This research suggests that the question is not whether to escape, but how. Running from yourself tends to make things worse. Running toward a larger self tends to make things better.
The Great Depression and the Golden Age of Escape
If you want to understand the role of escapism in society, look at the 1930s.
After the stock market crash of 1929, America plunged into the Great Depression. Unemployment soared. Families lost their homes. Hunger became common. It was, by many measures, the most difficult period in modern American history.
And it was also the golden age of escapist entertainment.
The historian Alan Brinkley, in his book Culture and Politics in the Great Depression, documents how escapism became the dominant trend for dealing with the era's hardships. Magazines, radio, and movies all aimed to help people mentally escape from mass poverty and economic downturn.
Life magazine, which became hugely popular during the 1930s, filled its pages with images of bathing beauties and ship launchings and building projects and sports heroes. Poverty and unemployment were virtually absent. A reader could consume the magazine and see "no indication that there was such a thing as depression," even as they lived through one.
Hollywood followed the same logic. Musicals flourished, with elaborate dance numbers and glittering costumes. Screwball comedies depicted the antics of the wealthy, allowing audiences to laugh at problems they would have loved to have. Gangster films showed men seizing power and wealth outside the broken system.
The director Preston Sturges made a film explicitly about this dynamic. Sullivan's Travels tells the story of a director of lightweight comedies who wants to make a serious message picture about suffering, to be titled O Brother, Where Art Thou? He sets out to experience poverty firsthand, to gather material for his important film.
Through a series of adventures, Sullivan ends up in prison—a real prisoner now rather than a tourist of misery. In a powerful scene, he watches his fellow inmates, poor and destitute men, gather to watch a Mickey Mouse cartoon. The men laugh with genuine joy. For a few minutes, they forget where they are.
Sullivan learns the lesson Sturges wants to teach: there is value in making people laugh. Making a film about suffering when people are already suffering might be, in Sturges's words, "foolish and vain and self-indulgent." Sometimes escape is what people need.
The Cost of Comfort
But the 1930s also demonstrate the costs of escapism.
The films of that era, as Brinkley notes, "consciously, deliberately set out to divert people from their problems." This diversion worked. People felt better, for a while, in the dark of the theater.
But the diversion also worked in another way. It diverted people from the problems of those around them. The fantasy of individual escape can undermine the solidarity needed for collective action. While audiences watched Fred Astaire dance, they were not organizing unions or demanding government relief or challenging the systems that had created the crisis.
This is the double edge of escapism at the social level. It provides necessary relief, but it can also provide too much relief—enough relief that people stop pushing for change. The bread and circuses that comfort the population also quiet them.
The Question We Cannot Escape
So where does this leave us?
Escapism is neither purely good nor purely bad. It is a human capacity, like aggression or desire, that can serve life or damage it depending on how it is used.
The case for escapism is strong. We cannot, as Freud said, subsist on the scanty satisfaction we can extort from reality. We need auxiliary constructions. We need rest and refresh. We need to imagine other worlds so that we can change this one. The enemies of escape are often jailers, and what they call reality is sometimes just the prison they want to keep us in.
The case against escapism is also strong. Permanent residence in fantasy leads to the atrophy of real life. Self-suppressive escape makes depression worse, not better. Societies that provide too much escape may produce populations too comfortable to demand justice. The Eloi were happy, right until they were eaten.
Perhaps the answer lies in Stenseng's distinction. Escape toward self-expansion—toward the discovery of new aspects of yourself and your world—tends to be healthy. Escape toward self-suppression—toward the obliteration of unwanted thoughts and feelings—tends to be harmful.
Or perhaps the answer lies in Tolkien's observation. Good fantasy requires an element of horror. Good escape must include the possibility of return, must keep one foot in the difficult real, must remember that the dragon is real even when the dragon is imaginary.
What we cannot do is escape the question of escapism itself. Every person must find their own balance between engagement and retreat, between facing reality and creating alternatives. Every society must find its own balance between providing comfort and demanding change.
The question is not whether to escape. We will escape; it is in our nature. The question is where we are going, and whether we can find our way back.
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