What Are We Running From?

How Escapism is a Turn Away from Life

I think about death. A lot. And not in an obsessive sort of way. But rather in the realm of acute awareness of my eventual demise. I don’t think a day goes by that I do not contemplate death’s horizon in one form or another. And not always my own. I can be doing something as innocuous as listening to a Frank Sinatra song and I will feel some nostalgia towards the time period of the record. I then project myself into all the people of the same era and think how many of them are likely gone. Or I will hear someone mention of a writer or poet and immediately scan their Wikipedia page for their age at death. (Which is clearly my way of comparing the juice squeezed to that of my own. But I digress.)

What types of lives did they lead? How did they live until the end? Were they afraid? Did they contemplate their life’s significance? Were they courageous in the face of their demise, or did they cower? There is a tension of the past pulling on the present. 

I find myself asking the same questions of myself as I will one day melt into the ether with these people.

When you think about death long enough, you eventually will run into terrifying truths. The type of truth that makes you shudder. An anxiety of the infinite, as Kierkegaard would call it. Borrowing from Randy, Death Awareness is sentience. A conscious awareness of death is the creator of time. You can confront death or bury it. To bury existential Truth, is to get your ass beat by death. 

“He who is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility… When such a person, therefore, goes out from the school of possibility, and knows more thoroughly than a child knows the alphabet that he demands of life absolutely nothing, and that terror, perdition, annihilation, dwell next door to every man, and has learned the profitable lesson that every dread which alarms may the next instant become a fact, he will then interpret reality differently.”

-Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

Are we at an impasse with ourselves? One can hide from himself in an inexhaustible means of escape. Alcohol, shopping, television, drugs, gossip, careers, travel, business, health, longevity, social media, etc. are amongst the most obvious forms of escapism. But this is nothing new for humans as we have concocted countless versions and ways to alter our perception or interface with reality over our existence. However, we should be wary of how potent and often we venture into our vehicles of escape. 

“Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.”

-Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

There is a discordance between the inner reality and our outer world. We aim to minimize entropy (aka surprise) and replace it with what is expected. We feel the inner tug from the throws of existence. That which is uncertain and contains most certain demise and death. Anxiety arrives (recognized or not) as an insight into what we are experiencing. But we don’t like the feeling it gives us. And we seek out ways to quell the angst.

Escapism can be thought of as a means to solve a problem. You have some inner pang, and in order to soothe it, you are going to try and tame the element of surprise. You do not want to confront the uncomfortable truth that anything is possible. The escape is a turn away from meaningful experience. 

Alcohol, often thought of as a social drug, is an example of a form of escape that aims to solve a problem. We typically think of alcohol as a drug with a responsive feeling. The effects we are searching for (euphoria/relaxation/anesthesia) are an actual aim to curb an inner problem. The problem can range, from social anxiety, self loathing, perceived stress, to fear, PTSD or terror. You aren’t drinking because it “makes you feel good.” You drink because you already “do not feel good,” and you want to feel better. [The common reaction most people have to this is one of defense. “It’s not that serious. People can, like, drink or do drugs just to have fun, man!” My retort is, then why isn’t experience enough? Why are we unable to enjoy an experience without alteration.]

Camus’ analysis on Epicurus was correct in that he shunned the gods away in order to avoid feeling troubled. Henceforth life became about pleasure and feeling good. The modern has adapted a similar mantra. Enter a formula for escapism as a means to find happiness. But the escape is but a fleeting moment of meaning. If life is about finding pleasure (or happiness), suggests life is a pursuit away from what lies before you. 

The purpose of life is not to be happy. The word you are actually looking for is: fulfilled. Where western thought has strayed, is through its vector for happiness. In an effort to find happiness, society by and large lost sight of meaning. Fulfillment stems from discovering the connection to the inner depths of your reality. A way to impart meaning to meaning, if you will. 

(Who am I?)

Hedonism is the prevailing virtue in American civics. And although it is not the only virtue prevalent in America today, it permeates throughout most of culture. Hedonism however, is but a symptom. It is the drum beat of fear. In order to shun destiny away, the modern attempts to obliterate sensibility. But the hedonist also destroys hope. In turn, the hedonist is left with little responsibility to himself or others. 

Although the hedonist runs from death, they are members of the death cult. The collection agency sends monthly letters, dings their credit score, leaves messages on their voicemails, but they will not turn to look at the outstanding bill. They bury their heads in the sand. Ignorance is not bliss. Heidegger’s being-towards-death concept is what creates the temporal framework to find the space for life; existence.

“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself. ” 

-Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

The answers to the lies you tell yourself are deep. I’m not talking one or two questions deep. You are going to have to keep asking yourself why until you are cyanotic. Eventually you will run into something that resembles fear, uncertainty, or death. And perhaps all three at once. 

But many seem to be concerned only with aesthetics, in terms of how things (or you) are perceived. Outward, material perceptions trump an exploration of what we are or what it means to run towards life. Many philosophical truths are not fit for open discussion as they can unravel your perception or reveal lies we have told ourselves. We bury these truths often through irony, escape, or “cope.”  

I am not too dimwitted to understand man has altered his reality long before we first turned over a cow pie and found magic mushrooms. What differentiates escapism as pathological or not is its proxy for becoming. Is the escape a generative force? Is it leading towards an expansion of yourself? Is the door of perception opening to a process? If not, the escape is a turn away from life.  

You see, to retreat into meaningless pursuits only generate slack in the line of your past-present-future continuum. Binge watching television or scrolling TikTok are life denying forces. These activities carry no tension towards your future. And they certainly do not rewrite your past in any meaningful way. There is no scenario in which the past satisfies the future with stories of your time spent with your neck cranked to 60°. You are left with an infinite present. Once again, time slips by without tautness. To face life is to create tension; drawing from the past and future. Turning towards life is becoming.

To dream, to imagine, to create. These are what gives man his ‘one-up’ on existence. For we can create entire worlds with the strike of a thought. Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Dodgson’s Wonderland comes to mind as a textured and deep alternate reality to ours. Waiting for our departure from this world into that one. All it takes is the turn of a page. 

But we are not limited by literature as vessels of alternate realities. Our own dreams and thoughts beam an unfathomable amount of power to alter reality. If you sit around long enough, with enough awareness of the thoughts that pass through your consciousness, you will glimpse at boundless worlds of possibility. And in a sense, you will carry out existence in these worlds, albeit what seems fleeting.

It can be argued that psychedelics are more akin to doors leading to deeper truths of reality, than that of a rocket ship that breaks away from our atmospheric experience. However, (as I have said before) the psychonauts have only found these doors as hopes to a shortcut into divine truth. They provide a direct access to perceptions we likely do not possess a context to understand or make sense of. To come to know Truth is that of a bricklayer, not a cosmonaut. 

The bricks you lay, however, are that of your own constitution. To confront yourself, is to acknowledge you are alone. But we can not become alone when you melt yourself into a primordial soup. Perhaps where the psychedelic escape works for improving one's “wellbeing,” is through a form of love. And this love is organized from the recognition of the Other. It is built through your relationship to something else. Love is a tension created between entities. However, your character dissolution is actually a narcissistic pursuit of self-love. When you are thrown back into yourself, you are left to recognize yourself and its polarity with the totality of all else. 

Death provides provisions of the other as well. For death is something other than life. 

Reality is not a cohesive structure you put together by yourself. The metaphysics are made of up forces beyond you. And so the plot carries forth as if you are not the screenwriter of reality. This uncertainty, the unknown, leaves a gaping hole in our notions of comfort. And in order to distract ourselves from certain uncertainty, we hide away. Escapism is distraction².  

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

-H.P. Lovecraft

We seem to be sliding further from an ability to meet ourselves. To be a bricklayer of your own reality is an arduous process. Escapism is the means to hide from what is true. To hide from the underpinnings of existence, one uses several tools at their disposal to avoid an internal journey. The mirror is too much to bear for many. To know thyself is a burden unfit for society who resides in the providence of moral relativism. 

To hold steadfast values or virtues will be constantly pricked by diverging forms of values and systems. An ever present cold war rages on between yourself and others when defining yourself in the moral relativism framework. And in an effort to smooth over the outer rejection from the world, we decide not to look at truth within. It becomes troublesome to know our shortcomings, faults, and especially our fallibility in the face of an external world that does not hold yours or any one else’s values in high esteem (because morality has been obliterated).

But the same way the psychedelic experience blends you up and spits you into the cosmos, suspending time, merging you with the universe, is happening with the internet. The internet is creating a unified, monoculture, where all is the same. Our plasticity towards sameness is, unfortunately, a turn away from temporal experience. When death and fear is melded into everyday life, with no discernable recognition of “other” or contemplation, we are lost in time.

I can now ignore him in four dimensions.

The hedonist is unmasked, beating death’s drum, evading the outstanding bill of existence. Escapism’s pleasures, now, emerges as a means to solve the problem of discomfort and uncertainty, offering a temporary reprieve from the profound questions of life.

Let us reconsider the value of escapism in the pursuit of a more meaningful and fulfilled existence. Ultimately, we are running from ourselves, and the journey towards understanding and embracing that truth is the essence to a path back home.

Let us consider escapism as only a detour from the inevitable return; a circle to be closed. I may sit alone in the dark, but I will leave the light on for you when I leave.