My evolving view on escapism.

This is something I wrote in mid November. I'm posting it in it's original form, unedited. For the purpose of this blog, i want to show how i was feeling at that time. Since then, my feelings on the matter have progressed slightly, so part of me wants to go through and edit this, add to it. I say all this as a disclaimer. These are my thoughts as I had them.

I think I'll do that as a later post: the revised version.

An Argument for Escapism.

This past summer, I was sitting on a train back to Boston, my eyes searching the fluid horizons in search of something to distract my wandering mind from its inevitable path. I have always taken some level of comfort in the idea that my depression is something most do not experience. To be unique, to have something that is all my own, this is something that makes me feel just a bit better. It is sad that I find comfort in that which makes life so hard, but that’s another story for another day.

As my eyes mimicked the wandering motions of my mind, they fell upon a fellow passenger. On some occasions, I am blessed with moments of clarity; split seconds in time where every facet of life makes perfect sense, where human behavior is no longer a puzzle but a simple set of motions easily predicted by study and observation. In the moment I saw this fellow passenger, who, for those sexually-minded, was a fellow, I had one of these revelations. The man was reading a magazine.

The thought that occurred to me was as follows: what if I’m not alone? For some time now, I’ve begun to doubt that my depression is much more than something I have brought upon myself, an idea I try not to consider, for if it were true what a fool I am! I saw this man reading a magazine, a common enough task, and it all hit me at once. In order to try and express what I felt, I will present it in a somewhat formulaic approach.

If we assume that all human beings experience the same doubts, the same fears, the same depression that I do, we must, therefore, assume that they know something I do not, if only how to hide it effectively. In that moment, the solution became clear to me: constant media saturation. By keeping themselves constantly focused on one thing or another, from reading a magazine on the train to watching television after work, from listening to music while walking (a favourite tactic of mine) to getting blind drunk as often as possible to forget the painful thoughts that keep creeping back. In this revelation came another: a complete comprehension of escapism.

I had heard that term before and had understood it, but had never fully comprehended its implications. Escapism implies we are running from something, that there is a thing we are trying quite hard to avoid. Hundreds of thousands of people are employed in the business of escapism for the masses. This is how far we have come as a civilization: our escapist department is growing larger than our necessity department, our wants have taken precedent over our needs. We need to eat, drink, excrete waste, and sleep from time to time. We want to believe there is more to life than this. We want a lot of things.

As I watched the fellow with the magazine, I pondered him having the same mind as me, reading his magazine to keep his mind from wandering where mine was going before i noticed him, and it occurred to me that perhaps this was how everyone seemed so happy. Everyone kept their minds so occupied they never had chance to ponder their lives, never even considered death as happening to them.

Years ago, a woman who had served as a teacher in my high school died. She was an amazing woman and to this day I am honoured to have known her, but when she died, I felt no grief. The same is true of the passing of my grandfather. The day after the news was announced, I witnessed something that, until recently, confused me beyond all rationale.

Somewhere in history, writers must have become fed up with the complaint that “that could never happen” and began to try and make their writing as realistic as possible. If you look at entertainment of the past twenty years, this trend is easy to spot. So much of what we indulge in has this air of “this isn’t like the movies,” an unintentional shattering of the fourth wall, to be sure. Films seem to be obsessed with being as accurate to reality as possible these days, no longer involving imagination but trying as hard as possible to be believable. Perhaps it is because we are growing tired of suspending disbelief. I hope this isn’t so. I love doing that.

Imagination is something I still feel is wonderful, despite all the doubts in my head. Imagination made my childhood so much more magical, if only in my own head and with the friends of mine who shared the free-flowing dreams of childhood, when everything was possible in the mind. As the reality trend grows and grows, escapism slowly becomes shunned by some, which baffles me. If people wanted to see reality, it’s not in the movie theater or their newest novel, nor should it be there. It’s called “fiction” for a reason.

This is the question I pose to you now, with everything I have said in mind: if we make our entertainment, our escapism, indistinguishable from reality, are we not, in essence, escaping reality by going to reality?

Isn’t that just a bit psychotic?

Some days after this, with the experience fresh in my head, I had a long conversation with a friend of mine in which we pondered if, indeed, what we felt, the dissatisfaction with life in general and so on, was felt by everyone or not. Neither of us wanted to believe it, because what did that make us? 

So for those of you that wonder why Death Race 2000 is my favorite film, the reason is simple: it is one of the greatest pieces of escapism I have ever witnessed.