Escapism

I have been thinking about escapism lately. As far as I can tell, we are up to our ears in it. In virtually every story-telling medium employed today, whether movies, music, books, or some other innovation, escapist fiction is far more popular than true-to-life experiential stories. This disproportionate dispensation has and will continue to redefine ourselves on a fundamental, moral level. I would like to specifically look at how the area of special relationships has been affected.


It is not difficult to find stories which revolve around a person's stronger-than-normal relationship to another. I suppose this makes sense, as it becomes a chief concern in someone's mind (usually) rather early in one's young adulthood and persists for many years. But it seems that when we look for answers about how to handle these things, we don't get very many good answers. What is perhaps the most confusing and personally important aspects of our lives seems devoid of help. Instead of getting stories about real relationships, we get canned, cliched tales of magic fairy-dust. We aren't told about how hard you have to work at a relationship to build it up and make it strong. About the sacrifice involved. About the sheer grit you need to slog your way through the relational winters. How to balance the most important human-human relationship in one's life with other duties, friendships, and obligations.


Now, most of us aren't idiots. We know whether we are being served something fantastic or factual. But knowing a few examples of what is fiction doesn't really help us determine what is fact. We're still left with nothing to hang onto. And so we venture out on our own, trying to feel our way through this minefield, hoping to not get ourselves too mangled before reaching something.


Perhaps this is a cultural crying-out in dissatisfaction. Whatever way most people seem to be searching for love doesn't work well. If the rates of failed marriages are anything to go by (I assume that they are), something isn't right. Maybe people don't have "the right stuff" for the relationship to survive anymore. If that is the case, then we need to consider what our predecessors had going for them that we don't. Or maybe it is closer to what I stated above, and it is that people don't know what to expect anymore and perhaps dive into the whole ordeal recklessly or with unreal expectations. So then people become dissatisfied, which makes escapism a more popular form of passing the time, letting people get away from their unhappy reality. And if demand for escapism increases, then more will be produced, swamping out the true stories even more. This will further ensure that people will not know what to expect. See the spiral?


But perhaps there is reason to be hopeful. The very thing driving this cycle of disappointment is potentially our way out of it. When faced with the dissatisfaction of a failing relationship, we have a few options. We can ignore it, as our stoic predecessors may have done. While things may look fine on the surface, there is much that is being poisoned and missed out on. Or we can take the most popular course of action today and try to escape it. While escaping can make the pain go away for a little while, it only makes things worse, further skewing expectations for the next generation. Or we can take this dissatisfaction and let it motivate us to find out how to make it work. Facing our problems and dealing with them appropriately is never as easy or fun or happiness-inducing as running from them, but we will all be better for it, ourselves, our spouses, our families, our communities, our cultures.


TL;DR
Escapism drowns out true stories, making it harder to deal with reality, especially special relationships.