A friend of mine and I started talking the other day about that catch-all term, escapism.

It’s been used as an insult, saying all people do when watching movies, reading books, and playing video games is escape. People want to get out of their real responsibilities and go to a different reality where pigs fly and wizards wave their wands. People just want to escape to childhood, before the world got “hard.” Stories let them do that.

It’s been used as an inspiration, saying people want to get out of a rough world to a world of imagination. People want to take a break from their responsibilities and go to a different reality where there is magic and monsters and wonder. People want to bring the joy and happiness of childhood into their present. Stories let them do that.

It’s also been used as an excuse, saying people just are having fun, when really, it’s covering up an addiction or anxiety or a refusal to grow up. It’s also been used as a criticism, saying people don’t really need to escape, but need stories to reflect and comment on reality; so they don’t really “escape” but instead confront a version of the real world. It’s also been used as a commentary, saying people do want to escape because look how empty, frustrating, and crazy the world really is: of course they want to escape! It’s also been used a social window, saying people live in an American “pragmatic” culture where everything has to have a use, and in the process have lost the quiet or loud imagination for imagination’s sake, beauty for beauty’s sake, that soaked the entire world in ages past.

In other words, it’s been used so many times that for many, escapism has lost all meaning.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers. Little ‘ol me, writing a blog post on escapism, won’t answer everyone’s questions. I’m sure people will disagree with me. To disagree, we’ll have to define storytelling and escaping. But, fundamentally, I think there is value to escaping, whether it’s “useful” or not. At the same time, escapism can be dangerous: a crutch, a coping mechanism, or even a drug. But even in that, it proves again that for many parts of life, motive determines right and wrong, rather than the action or practice itself.

The Nature of Escaping

All storytelling is, fundamentally, leaving our reality and entering a new one.

Storytelling in all its forms creates a new reality. Even if it’s historical fiction, that is the very nature of fiction. It’s false. It didn’t really happen. So it’s not real. It’s not our reality. It will always be a different reality than our own.

Even if it’s nonfiction, like a biography of Abraham Lincoln or a history of the Roman Empire, it is creating a compressed reality. There’s no way to report all the facts or details of a person’s or country’s life, so you have to pick and choose. In the process, you’re creating a different reality than the real reality. Sure, The Chosen reports the narrative of the Bible, but it also creates its own in the process. Sure, Guns, Germs and Steel tries to construct a grand theory of human history, but in the process it has to condense and in that it probably shows the author’s biases. Yes, a good historian will try to make the reality they construct as similar as possible to the real deal. But they never fully can.

So, in order to tell a story, you have to journey to a different reality. It’s part of the process.

However, escape has different connotations than journey. To escape means to get away from something negative, or dangerous, or hard. So, if you’re escaping our reality to a different one, a constructed one—one that is fundamentally false because it did not happen or will never happen or cannot fully capture what happened—that must mean our reality is negative, dangerous, or hard.

Well, I don’t think anyone can deny that our reality is negative, dangerous, or hard.

Barring the negatives of our reality, our reality is simply limited. You can’t deny it; you can’t fly without an aircraft, you will never get to talk to your grandfather who passed again, you will never get to be in the 1500s. But the only limits of our imagination, of the realities we create, is our imagination itself. So, constructing realities can simply be done to test limits, to break limits down. You can escape from a limited reality to a practically unlimited one.

And I don’t think constructing these new realities is necessarily childish. Play and imagination is often seen as something just for kids. Kids play with toys; kids play house or army… or Star Wars or Harry Potter. Kids watch cartoons and dream of spaceships and imagine.

Yet then you read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, a work of historical fiction… yet fiction nonetheless. You cannot deny that he is imaginative. You cannot deny that he is creating a new reality, a reality that did not really happen. And that reality is for adults to explore and discover and wonder at. So, reality creating and imagination are for adults and for children (though they may take different forms).

However, just because something is a new reality, one of pure or mostly or even a little bit imagination, breaking the limits of our own reality, doesn’t make it not true.

The Value of Escaping

Does escaping need to have a purpose?

Some might say that in order for the escaping to matter, it must have a purpose. “It must tell you something about yourself. It must express your emotions. It must have a lesson. It must inform us about a culture or a time period. I need to have a purpose to escaping, in order for my escaping to matter.”

Of course, traveling to a new reality can have great value. All of those things are true.

Creating a new reality in our imagination reflects the creator. Keanu Reeves’ own experience and personality is written all throughout the John Wick series. When we create, we reflect ourselves. Everything Everywhere All at Once contains pieces of so many people, their own struggles with depression and suicide and meaning of life. Not the least of which are the directing duo the Daniels who wrote and directed, but also Ke Huy Quan who returned to acting just for the role. La La Land has Damien Chazelle’s ideas about Hollywood and jazz. And Ran has Kurosawa’s views on the culture of Japan in the distant past as well as his present.

Yet it’s not just the creators. Entering a new reality that we didn’t create but choose to participate in can give us so much, too. It can entertain us, yes. It can allow us to experience things we’ve never experienced or never will be able to experience. It can satisfy our own creativity or problem-solving skills. It can give us a home when we don’t have a home in our reality. It can give us friends, friends that might exist only in the pages or on the screen or in the mind but still leave us not alone. It can help us understand our world, our place, and ourselves.

But even if it does none of that, even if all entering a new reality does it let us escape the limits or our own reality for a little while, is that ok? Is there still value in the pure act of journeying from our reality to another?

I’d say, from the heaviness I feel whenever I watch the ending of Avatar: The Last Airbender, a sadness that this story, this brief escape, was over, I’d say so. Escaping for the pure act of escaping still has value, whether or not you get anything out of it.

As adults, it’s easy to move beyond escapism. To think that imagination is just for kids. And so maybe we try to give all of that psychological, emotional, and political value to storytelling to add value. To add pragmatism and power to something that already has power. We don’t need to make the journey stronger. Journeying, escaping, in it of itself has value. While we can pick apart Shakespeare for all of its meaning and political messaging and psychological creativity, at the end of the day he’s still just creating a reality for your to escape in. Whether it’s eleventh century Denmark or fourteenth century Italy or negative first century Rome, we get to escape for a while. The adult part of it is all well and good. That value can still exist… alongside the value of the escape itself.

And so, escape. Journey to a new reality so different or just like your own.

The Danger of Escaping

But the escape isn’t always positive.

Video game addiction. Children, boys, girls, men, women, who waste away because they spend eight hours a day absorbed in a different reality than their own. People who spend hours listening to other people’s stories and realities on Tik Tok or YouTube rather than living their own. Employers and employees who listen for hours of podcasts when work could be getting done.

When you escape from your reality to a different reality, one without limits or the negatives of our own or your own, you enter into danger. Yes, entering into a new reality by itself has value. But it will never be yours. It will never be your reality.

Perhaps that is why people have to find all sorts of reasons that escapism has use. It helps me cope. It helps me learn. It teaches hand-eye coordination. It makes me happy. It makes me sad. It hones my craft. It does this or that or the other thing.

But perhaps, in the process of finding a value beyond the escaping, a person might be finding an excuse for neglecting their own reality.

And that is the danger. The danger of entering a different reality is when you neglect your own.

The Motive of Escaping

So that’s what it all comes down to.

Where does the “neglecting” begin? Where does the value end? When is escaping your crutch, and when is escaping your wings?

As many things in life, it all comes down to motive. You can be a perfectly honest person, and be honest for all the wrong reasons: to show off, to earn people’s favor, to get revenge.

In the same way, you can escape for all the wrong reasons. You can escape to medicate, to get away from a reality that needs to be dealt with, with the more important reality; yours. The real reality. The only reality you really have.

And yet, journeying into a new reality, your own creation or someone else’s, is valuable for its own sake. The journey is worth the journey. So, too, the journey can help you express your emotions, speak about your politics, bring you friends where you had few, power where you had none, success where you had loss, adventure to new lands or old lands or crazy lands or lands that never existed.

The motive to the journey is important, yes. But so too is the journey. We tell stories, we experience stories. We create our story and create stories for others. We travel, we journey; the “why” of the journey holding up the journey itself.

Escaping isn’t bad. The journey is important, in it of itself. There and back again. And journeying is what we were meant to do.

So, what’s the “why” for your story? What’s the “why” for your journey? When the motive is right, the journey falls into place.

When our “why” is right, then our journey is what we’re meant to do.