It's not even a month in. And everything is still burning. Hmm. Quite on brand with this doom and gloom vibe. And sometimes. It can be tiresome. Tired of acknowledging reality is taking a straight dive into the dumpster. Tired of acknowledging all problems will eventually blow up into thousand pieces of bigger problems. Tired of interfacing with ithem even further. Don't you want to escape from it all? Maybe for a moment. Maybe for a while. Maybe ... forever?

That's a point of no return you don't want to step into.

A Great Game To Play

Recently ... Wait, no. Not recently. Hold on. When did I discover it? Uh ... A year ago? Yeah. Around that. Ahem.

A year ago. I was looking for a sandbox game to enjoy. But most of them are quite restrict or hand holding the player too much. Then I came across a totally unhinge JPRG sandbox game called "Elin". Elin is a successor of an old JRPG sandbox game called "Elona". To not spoil too much. In Elin. You go on adventures, do some quests, build farms, eat little girls to increase your stats (word for word, cannibalism), commit crimes, and pay taxes (or else). This game might have some learning curves. But once it clicks, it will become a time blackhole.

So. How many hours I sink into this game? Around 250 hours. That's ... ten and a half days. Progression? Back to the first square. My save file got lost because I forgot to export it when I was replacing my OS from Micro$lop Binblows 11 to Linux Mint (I'm not planning to hop distros. QEMU can do just that). So, I had to grind my way back to where I was. Again.

This is not the first time that this happens.

"Okay? Then why are you telling me all of this?"

Well. First. If you are a gamer, give Elin a try. And second. I feel guilty of spending my weekends on that game. Don't get me wrong. It's a great game. But it made me forget to do my chores or anything else I was supposed to do for the rest of the day. I had to mop my house at 9 PM like a fast food worker closing the place ffs. Good thing it was Saturday. If it was Sunday, it would end up more depressing. Can you imagine doing house chores at late-night? Who does that!?

Yeah. That's a consequence of me taking a break from reality for a while. I had fun for sure. But all that fun was traded with me tiringly moping my floor due to how dusty it was. What's up with PM 2.5 in this damn country anyway? Eh. But that was just a small slice of consequence when I indurged in escapism for way too long. Oh, right. I didn't tell you that game drained ten hours. As I said. It really was a time blackhole. I don't think that's a selling point of this game. But what I can sell you right now is talking about escapism. And why everyone seems to be leaning toward into it like it's a blackhole.

Understanding Escapism

Escapism is the tendency or the desire to escape from daily routine by indulging in fantasies. It serves as a distraction away from reality, providing a lucid moment to depressed individuals in their hard times. Escapism itself is not a new concept nor originated to be used in a negative connotation. Although as time changes, escapism is leaning toward to its negative meaning rather than positive one. Escapism comes in many forms. By popularity. Entertainment media is the most apparent form of escapism since its purpose is literally providing a mental break from exhaustion in real life.

While taking in a moderate amount of escapism is okay. When it has become a maladaptive response to reality, it will become a negative feedback loop. A person realizes their reality sucks and it will stay that way, no matter what they do. They start to look for a way to escape or forget their reality. When they find one, they will start to invest their time in it, which creeps up their time more and more. And finally. It consumes them completely from top to bottom. Reality is now their secondary world (or even less than that). But since they were born in reality, they still need to maintain their position in reality. "Maintaining their position" in this context means to interact with reality elements to maintain their existence. However. Since their perception of reality is in negative side, they will start to minimize anything that requires them to face reality. Eventually. Their desire to escape from reality becomes so strong they start to shut themselves in and avoid facing reality as much as possible.

The core reason why escapism trends are rising is because facing problems in reality isn't worth it anymore. Escapism is a form of rejection against reality one finds themselves in. It's a coping mechanism our brains developed to protect itself from stress or numbness. It makes sense why escapism is a valid choice when all attempts to resolve problems are rejected or have impacts onto other problems, making them worse. It's like a jenga of complex traumas. One wrong move and it all crumbles down to a pile. Due to that. The only logical move is to not interact with them.

Escapism is born from learned helplessness. It is a psychology state where one feels their life is out of their control from being exposed to negative events repeatingly. This leads to development of avoidance personality where one refuses to engage themselves in anything. Learned helplessness accelerates the process of escapism by blocking all help attempts from others or from within oneself due to their belief their problems are beyond salvageable. It's an equivalent of setting up oneself for disappointments before they actually happen.

So, does all of this conclude escapism is a bad thing? No. Healthy escapism can help us when things get tough rather than double down on them. A moderate amount of escapism can make us happier since it relieves stress and boost our imaginations too. After all. Escapism fictions do exist. They provide a glimpse of what reality couldn't be and shouldn't be. It allows other people to be inspired by its creations. It allows people to connect each other through escapism activites. And eventually. Escapism tends to evolve itself into something more than just an escape. A reality inspired by them.

... If it only was beautiful as I described. Its advantages still don't outweight its disadvantages. But not because escapism itself is bad to the bone. Escapism is bad when one indurges in it for too long. It's not an escape anymore. It becomes a prison. Escapism doesn't make one free from reality. But instead. It creates a jail cell between them and reality. Hence. They are still stuck in reality but with less potential to strive in it.

Snap Back To Reality

As awful as our reality has become. I mean. You, readers, acknowledges it too, right? Cracks in infrastructures. Dry woods in nature. Timebombs with no ways to defuse. Everything in reality are heading toward to their own self destructions. Short term gains, long term sufferings. But even with all of that. Everyone has to return to reality, no matter how crappy it has become. To return back to reality is to ground oneself. Without proper landing, one might injure themselves and disassociate even further from real life than before. But the ground you have will be a solid one.

To be honest. I need to tell this to myself more than to others. Because I have been relying on escapism as a clutch to survive in each day. In a modern sense term. "Cope and seethe." But then again. I'm better off than most of people at my age. I have a decent job. I can pay my bills. I do have some money spare for further "investments" and for rainy days. Although. Nothing is truly stable in this world. Nothing will be sacred due to short term gains. So, find a strong ground in this reality to stand on. When you fall, at least you'll have a ground to stand back on again.

Anyway. Thank you for reading all of this wall of texts. Stay in tune for one more definitive rant before I'll start to live aggressively against the world. And by that aggressively, I meant more active than before. Very ... Very active, indeed.