on escaping (or saving the world, your choice)

Do you want to escape the world, or save it?

Merriam Webster defines escapism as a, “habitual diversion of the mind to purely imaginative activity or entertainment as an escape from reality or routine”. Imagination and entertainment are broad categories, but generally speaking these methods are used to distract people from everyday life. They can include: sports, movies/film, television, books, music, etc.

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When I was in the fourth grade I fell in love with a series of sci-fi/fantasy YA novels called Pendragon: Journal of an Adventure Through Time and Space. Our protagonist is young Bobby Pendragon, a teenager who is able to use inter-dimensional portals in order to travel to different worlds or ‘territories’. In the first book, Bobby is plucked from his normal life and dropped on a planet with no knowledge of its culture or language or people. For a budding anthropologist, the series was a dream come true.

Written by D.J. MacHale, the Pendragon series was published during the years 2002-2009

Around the same time, I started going through puberty and noticed that the world around me didn’t make much sense. I realized the only times I felt true positive emotion was when I was reading about Bobby Pendragon and his efforts saving reality. I spent hours reading under my desk in school, or at night when I was supposed to be asleep. I was addicted to reading.

Loor (the dark-skinned woman on the cover of book six) was introduced in the first book as a counter-part to Bobby. Also a Traveler, she came from the planet Zadaa, where she was trained as a fearsome warrior. She probably wasn’t the best representation, but for a white kid in 2007, she seemed like the ultimate badass. Their romance was comically drawn out, but the world building was what hooked me. In each book, the Travelers (the only people who can use the magic portals) are flung into a territory on the brink of peril. They don’t know how or why, but they know massive conflict is coming. Sometimes the actions of the Travelers end up causing more turmoil, and they don’t always succeed in saving each territory.

In the fourth book, The Reality Bug, we travel to a territory called Veelox. Veelox is strikingly similar to Earth, with some Star Wars elements thrown in for good measure. The inhabitants drink blue milk and use incredibly complex technology to simulate a virtual reality. Some residents use it sparingly, or not at all, but others are fully plugged in- at all times. It was a good metaphor for addiction, and possibly internet usage since at the time of publication smartphones didn’t exist.

The inhabitants of Veelox are happy to stay inside their virtual bubbles, letting the real world decay around them. In the setup we meet another Traveler who has created a virus which will hopefully make the system obsolete. Her ‘bug’ targets each reality, making it just a little bit less desirable to be inside of. If your fake friends are cruel, wouldn’t that incentivize you to go outside and see your real friends? The theory is sound, but humans can be fickle as you know.

Unfortunately, D.J. MacHale may have predicted a little more than I had. Spoilers ahead, but Veelox is the first world which Bobby and the Travelers are unable to save. The citizens refuse to leave their virtual realities and the territory literally dies with them. It was tragic, and poignant. Decades later, I can still remember my shock and fear upon learning that the good guys had failed- despite their noble motivations. What was going to happen to Veelox now? What was going to happen to the people still alive, within the virtual reality? What was going to happen to the world they were letting fall apart?

Later, about halfway through book eight, we discover the territory we have been trying to save is not Ibara (like we were originally told), but in fact it is a future version of Veelox. Instead of one conflict to end all others, the planet has multiple points in time where the Travelers can influence good to take over. Veelox is not a lost cause. There is still hope.

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When I was twelve years old, before I started hurting myself, I wrote a three-page diary entry about how I felt broken. I didn’t understand why the world outside my books felt so bleak. I felt like there was no great adventure waiting for me, no novel-worthy romance or action thriller. I was just a girl, growing up in the early 2000’s, nothing special. I was clinically depressed and without an outlet, unable to see any meaning in my dull life.

I credit books for helping me notice this shift in my mindset. Without the self-awareness, I wouldn’t have recognized these signs of mental illness when I did. Is it possible the residents of Veelox could have used virtual reality in this way? Instead of living within the fantasy, could they have used it to see where parts of their real life were lacking? Or was the allure of escape just all-encompassing?

As the years have gone by, my escapist tendencies have not changed. I would like to think I manage them better as an adult (I may have played over 400 hours of Baldur’s Gate but that doesn’t mean I’m addicted). Since the election news last week, I have been shamelessly enjoying my monster romance novels (Ice Planet Barbarians, just in case you were wondering). I’m not sure how much intellectual merit those books have, but that is kind of the point. No?

During the Great Depression, escapism was all the rage. Magazines, books, cartoons, and films were produced and benefited the public by taking their mind off the horrors happening around them. Freud called this a type of psychic retreat. The public looked for entertainment, not critical consumption. People wanted to escape, not to be reminded of the crashing stock market or forthcoming world wars. And it worked; we distracted ourselves with fantasy and imagination. The best example that comes to mind is MGM’s 1939 adaptation of the Wizard of Oz and its fantastic use of Technicolor. While being hailed as one of the most influential films of the century, the Wizard of Oz notoriously made no profit until the 1949 re-release.

Promotion for the 1939 Wizard of Oz film, which premiered during the tail end of the Great Depression

In this way, we can end up consuming propaganda uncritically. Media literacy is a hot issue right now, but even that doesn’t encapsulate the whole scope of the problem. When I read a cringey romance novel, I choose whether I want to critically examine how women are portrayed. When we watch Star Wars, we choose to examine the parallels with the Vietnam War. This choice isn’t overt either, it is programmed by how we see the world around us. We are taught to choose passivity.

I am not trying to dunk of escapist media, or those who consume it. I think escape from reality is an essential part of personhood. Being able to imagine new possibilities and explore new ideas is part of what it means to be human. Daydreaming isn’t maladaptive- it’s human nature. It signals to us that something is deeply wrong with the world we are living in, when millions of people refuse to come back to reality. It signals to us on a personal level, that we are unhappy with our lives.

Maybe that’s why I remember Veelox so well, twenty years later.

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To quote a popular Tumblr post:

durr hburr technology is bad fire is scary thomas edison was a witch

I find this satire very apt. It isn’t the tools that cause suffering, but the ways in which we wield them. Virtual reality, in and of itself, is not inherently harmful. The same goes for generative AI. These tools are scary because human beings can be unpredictable. We are all capable of violence, of using the tools at our disposal to induce suffering.

Wanting to escape the world is normal. Using escapist media isn’t inherently harmful. In fact, it can be used to inspire hope and plant seeds for future change. It can be used to teach and explore, to learn and to love. But it can also be used as a distraction, as a tool to look away from the reality in front of us. It can be used as a vehicle for propaganda, as a justification for violence.

If we refuse to examine the media we consume, then we are at best, passive. We allow the horrors to continue if we never return from our escape. We allow the world to rot, for the sake of a daydream.

Saving the world takes work. It takes effort to use best practices, to dream alternate ways of doing things, to analyze our own behavior and actions. Escaping reality is much easier, as the citizens of Veelox demonstrated. It’s easy to lay down and watch Lord of the Rings, or play Baldur’s Gate until your eyes bleed. It’s easy to take propaganda at face value, to assume without learning, to stay in a toxic relationship, to continue the same cycles over and over again.

In a world that encourages passivity and docility, rebellion looks like critical analysis. Saving the world looks like dissertations about turnip economics in Animal Crossing, or the military industrial complex in Transformers. Saving the world means learning to engage in life, critically and analytically.

So, in summary: escapist media is not bad. Keep reading your Tom Clancy, Stephanie Meyer, George R.R. Martin, and Sylvia Day novels. But please, remember to use your critical thinking skills.