‘What Happens Next?’: Can Escapism Be Good for Us?

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Dr Susan Carland: Welcome back to What Happens Next?, the podcast that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world, and asks the experts, what will happen if we don't change? And what can we do to create a better future?

I'm Dr Susan Carland. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

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Michael W Clune: When you really encounter something new and vitalizing, whether it's through a book or a game or a piece of arts, it renews our sense of the world and it gives us a kind of ecstasy that comes along with that.

Whitney Monaghan: Some of these texts or pop culture phenomenons, they're all kind of based in a sense of hope for the future. They're based in goodness prevailing.

Clem Bastow: It takes our dreams and makes them feel real for a couple of hours.

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Susan Carland: A quick content warning before we begin this episode includes a mention of drug use. If you'd like to avoid this, skip ahead to the timestamp indicated in the show notes.

In August 1979, 16-year-old James Dallas Egbert left his dorm room at Michigan State University and disappeared. A week later, his frantic parents hired a private investigator named William Dear to search for their missing son.

Dear soon learned that Egbert had been playing a fantasy role-playing game in his spare time, Dungeons & Dragons. As far as Dear was concerned, this game full of monsters and magic was to blame for Egbert's disappearance.

In the PI's opinion, which he didn't hesitate to share publicly, the young man had probably entered the steam maintenance tunnels beneath the university campus and lost his grip on reality.

The case fascinated the media and the connection between the game and Egbert's mysterious disappearance was too good not to publish. In the coverage of the story, D&D was called a bizarre and secretive cult.

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Susan Carland: Egbert was eventually found – he actually called Dear and revealed his own whereabouts – but the damage to Dungeons & Dragons had been done.

It was the height of the Satanic panic in the US and UK, and the game was swept up in the fervour. Parents and religious leaders feared that excessive immersion in the fantasy realm of D&D could blur the lines between fiction and reality for players.

As we heard last week on What Happens Next?, there are still stigmas attached to escapist activities even today, whether it's a role-playing game or a Netflix marathon. Are those misgivings and societal perceptions reasonable or can escapism offer a necessary break from the stresses of everyday life?

Keep listening to find out what happens next.

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Susan Carland: Professor Michael W Clune is a critic and a professor at Case Western Reserve University. He's the author of Game Life, a memoir about computer games, and of Whiteout, an account of his life while he was struggling with heroin addiction. The result is a singular point of view on escapism.

Michael, welcome to the podcast.

Michael W Clune: Thank you for having me.

Susan Carland: What do you see as the connection between escapism and video games, for example?

Michael W Clune: Well, so for me, something that's going to be a genuine escape is something that's going to give me a genuinely new perspective on the world and is going to take me out of my habitual frames of reference.

And what, in my view, what games do… The best games are… they give you a new set of senses, a new set of emotions, a new way to look at the world, a new way to experience the world, new goals, and it's almost like you're being put into a new body and a new mind to a degree, and moving around in it for a while.

So I've always felt games are a really effective way of performing that kind of perforation or escape.

Susan Carland: Mm. And then how would you see the relationship between escapism and addiction, say drug addiction?

Michael W Clune: Yeah, so I feel, and very often I think those two notions are conflated where people will worry that if someone is escaping, that they may fall into addiction.

For me, addiction is more like a collapsed or failed kind of escape, where, when you really encounter so something new and vitalising, whether it's through a book or a game or a piece of arts, it renews our sense of the world and it gives us a kind of ecstasy that comes along with that.

I feel like addiction just reduces, it takes away all the magic, all of the sort of mind expansion, and reduces it to simple jolts of dopamine, reliably delivered. And so what happens with the addict is far from actually escaping anything. They become trapped and enslaved in a sort of hamster wheel of looking for that next head of dopamine, whether it's through gambling, through drug use, or whatever.

Susan Carland: On last week's episode, Michael discussed the difference between video games designed to draw you into a narrative and video games designed to trigger those dopamine hits.

Yeah, just as you were talking, I was thinking about just how blurred the lines can be. Like you said, sometimes I'll hear video games in the background and I'll think, “Oh, that just sounds like what in Australia we would call ‘pokies’, these poker machines – that constant dinging sound and the lights.” And I think that's so much like that.

But then as you said about other games, the more narrative type of game, it's similar to a book in that there are times when I don't want to put my book down. I'm so involved in the narrative, I'm going to lose sleep because I want to finish the story. But generally, we wouldn't see that as being a negative addiction or escapism. It's just we're immersed in this narrative and it means, “Okay, I get a little bit less sleep”.

I guess what you're saying is the second type of video game you spoke about is more in that line, even though we can see that there are similarities between, like I said, “I want to lose sleep. I want to finish the book. No one talk to me. I'm trying to finish this story.” That kind of has echoes of the negative aspects of addiction we would talk about, but we don't see it that way.

Michael W Clune: Yeah, I think that's right. And it's interesting because when I'm absorbed in a book or absorbed in a game, I'm intent on it, and I'm fascinated on it, fascinated by it, but the way that I enter into it is much more complex and nuanced than simply pulling the slot machine or taking a hit of the drug, and that architecture that leads you to become absorbed in that story, I just think it operates according to a different logic than addiction.

And one way of thinking about it is, as much as I love losing myself in books or losing myself in games, it's not like I'm going to sell my TV or my wife is going to leave me. You know what I'm saying? There's a certain level of consequence.

One of the easiest ways to define addiction is your life becomes a chaos and a disaster because of the drug or the object, and yet you still can't stop. I've never experienced that with the kinds of absorption, the kinds of escapism that you're describing with books.

Susan Carland: Monash University Business School Associate Professor Davide Orazi studies pseudo-nostalgia, the manufactured longing for a place and a time that's passed – think Stranger Things and the ’80s.

Do you think that there is anything negative about us enjoying pseudo-nostalgia, or is it just, it's a fun, relatively frivolous, but non-problematic escapism?

Davide Orazi: I think it's up to you to what extent do you engage into it. It's a form of fantasy. So to what extent we are attracted. I don't see anything wrong, in principle, into being attracted to a different place.

We take breaks all the time. Some are mundane by scrolling, like social media, going on TikTok and watching videos of cats, and some are a little bit more elaborate when reading a book or watching a movie. As long as you don't go there too often, right?

The beauty of escapes, the beauty of accessing these extraordinary rounds is that the experience is temporary. So as long as that is not the norm, it's a break that is in no way maladaptive, is useful for you. It allows you to recuperate energies and to get positive distractions.

Susan Carland: Davide's research also examines escapist activities, including live action role-playing, or LARPing. People participate in LARPS to receive a number of benefits, he says.

Davide Orazi: So some people do that for enjoyment. They just want to… an escape, so it can be a form of holiday. So for free days, instead of going to Bali, you go to Westeros and suddenly you play A Game of Thrones with great houses. Some people like actually be challenged, so role-playing games and, even more, live action role-play games allow you to experience situations that you'll never be able to access because you've never been in the Middle Ages or in Westworld. So some people want to see how they behave in certain situations that are not normally encountered.

So its enjoyment, it's escape. It's education, but it's also empowerment. So a lot of people can understand things about themselves by putting them... These are simulations, right? They provide us with situations, and some people want to understand how would we react to the situations that are uncommon.

Susan Carland: And it's not just a mini-holiday or a challenge, Davide says. Escapism can teach us things.

Davide Orazi: Fun fact, I learned how to pick a lock during a LARP, so that, in a way, has an element related to what you asked.

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Susan Carland: Cultural critic and writer Dr Clem Bastow's PhD project focused on the intersection between autism, screenwriting and action movies.

As a neurodiverse person, they say escaping into a film just for a little while can feel a bit like becoming a new version of themselves.

Clem Bastow: I probably have a triple PhD in daydreaming, but I think in a way, as somebody who's autistic, for example, I mean, I watch narratives to not so much see myself reflected, but I guess a version of myself.

And so when I'm watching an action movie that is seeing characters that I relate to, experiencing this kind of mastery of the world that I don't necessarily day-to-day feel like I have access to. So I think that's a big part of it for me.

And some of it's just pure fantasy. Some of it is just, “Wouldn't it be nice to live on an off-world space colony?”, or, “Imagine being a mermaid”. It takes our dreams and make them feel real for a couple of hours.

Susan Carland: Do you think escapism is necessary for the human condition?

Clem Bastow: Yeah, it's really hard because I think there are people who are absolutely content with their world, with their experience of the world, who maybe don't feel that need for escapism in such an acute way, and I think it's maybe not so much a human condition as a condition of the circumstances in which humans find themselves.

Because I suppose if you look at the history of popular media, these types of films, books, even music, I mean, I suppose they've kind of proliferated through the 20th and 21st century, which is not to say that people listening to Hildegard von Bingen back in the day were not necessarily seeking to escape the circumstances of their lives. But yeah, I think so much of it is because there are aspects of modern life that are not fulfilling for people.

We've become highly individualised in many societies. I think part of escapism for people who don't live in countries or societies where that sort of collective sense of family is a big part of their day-to-day lives, I think a lot of the time that's maybe why they watch things.

Like even Little Women. That doesn't seem immediately relevant to a lot of our experiences. But when that came out a couple of years ago, the great Greta Gerwig version of it, I think people were really hungering for that. Imagine a world in which we're all looking out for each other. So yeah, I think it is a lot to do with the ways in which we're expected to live our lives under all of these systems.

Susan Carland: Dr Whitney Monaghan is a lecturer in communications and media studies at Monash University and the co-convener of the Monash Gender & Media Lab. She doesn't think we're escaping anything at all, no matter how hard we try.

Whitney Monaghan: Well, I'm not sure if we're actually escaping from our reality, but popular culture does give us lots of different worlds and identities and stories that we can kind of venture into for a short amount of time.

But we're never truly getting out of our real lives. We're always bringing our full selves, our full realities, our full experiences to our interactions and encounters with those types of media.

Susan Carland: So we are escaping with a backpack of… Our previous or current selves are coming with us.

Whitney Monaghan: Absolutely. We're just carrying that baggage with us all the time in the way that we make sense of media, in the way that we kind of relate to... In the way that we identify with a character or we don't identify with a character.

That's all things that we bring from our everyday experience into our encounters with media, even when we think we're just switching off and when we're tuning out for the day, we're still bringing that to the media encounter.

Susan Carland: Do you think when we do escape with our backpack, is that an important and necessary form of self-care? Is it a form of denial about who we are, or is it, like you said, is it about us actually trying to experience a different window to a world that maybe we don't have access to in our everyday lives?

Whitney Monaghan: Well, I think that we do that for a lot of different reasons. We engage with these kinds of pop culture films or television series for entertainment, sure.

We do it because we want to feel moved sometimes. We want to feel happy, we want to feel joy. Sometimes we want to get out of our own kind of lived experience or know the world through someone else's eyes, and I think that's what film does for us.

But on that notion of self-care, actually, there's this interesting thing that happened around the time of the pandemic when there was this phenomenon of binge-watching. I don't know if you're a binge-watcher, but –

Susan Carland: I would like to say no. I'd actually want to know… I will tell you what I'd binge-watch, but I'd be interested to know, what do you binge-watch? Anyway, finish your answer and then we'll get back to that.

Whitney Monaghan: So binge-watching is this kind of guilty pleasure, right? I was consuming film and TV, just excessively one after the other. But during the early days of the pandemic, binge-watching was something that we did as a form of self-care, right? We did it because there was a lot of uncertainty. There was isolation, and we tuned on to something so that we could be part of a rhythm, enjoy conversation with other people about pop culture.

Susan Carland: Yeah, it was Tiger King.

Whitney Monaghan: Tiger King. Yeah, absolutely.

Susan Carland: What a moment.

Whitney Monaghan: What people's memory of the pandemic is often going to be is going to be sitting down and watching Tiger King and posting Tiger King memes, which is incredible.

And it was also a kind of civic duty at that time because if we could stay at home, we should stay at home. We were in lockdown time. And so those that were staying at home and binge-watching, they were doing a civic duty.

And so I think that's a pretty interesting form of reframing our thinking about how we engage with media.

Susan Carland: Do you think that has carried over after the pandemic, or do you think binge-watching has now has that sort of negative overlay again?

Whitney Monaghan: Well, I mean, I think that... Yeah, it doesn't need to be having a negative overlay. I don't think it needs to be a guilty pleasure. I think there are no guilty pleasures.

Susan Carland: Ohhh.

Whitney Monaghan: It's just pleasures, right? We just like the things that we like. We shouldn't feel bad about them.

Susan Carland: Unless you are squashing ants, then we should feel guilty.

Whitney Monaghan: Okay. Yeah. Then if that's your guilty pleasure, you can hang onto that one.

Susan Carland: Although we've left the Satanic panic far behind, Clem still sees a lot of moral judgement surrounding escapism.

Clem Bastow: I think it's important to kind of avoid that idea of pathologising escapism or daydreaming. But yes, obviously if somebody is daydreaming at the expense of food and rational thought, it can become problematic. But I actually think we probably need to do it more as a whole.

I think so many aspects of our lives are there's that sense that we should be monetising everything, and so hobbies become side hustles, and I don't know. It's been really nice to reconnect with some hobbies of mine, which I can't monetise, which I can't turn into jobs, and to just do things for the sake of doing them and maybe not being all that great at them. And I sort of feel like escapism and daydreaming kind of fits into that a bit.

Whitney Monaghan: It's almost like we've been made to feel guilty for having leisure time.

Clem Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. That we're not using our time appropriately, and it's very pervasive. I mean, people like you and I think we're capable of thinking pretty critically, and I still find that it's very hard for me to just sit down and stare at a window. I get up five minutes later and think I should be doing something. I should unpack the laundry basket.

Susan Carland: Yeah, exactly. Like you said, it's not creating a side hustle out of it, even if you're not making money from it. There must always be industry attached to what we do.

Clem Bastow: Productivity. Yeah.

Susan Carland: So Whitney, what's your escapist guilty pleasure, binge-watch?

Whitney Monaghan: Well, I am a big fan of reality TV. I am just all over that. Every night I think, oh, should I watch a series, film, or should I watch 90 minutes of Married at First Sight?

Susan Carland: Couples screaming at each other?

Whitney Monaghan: I'm always going to choose the reality.

Susan Carland: See, that's interesting, and I want to ask you about that, because I think Married at First Sight is probably... I think it's the biggest show in Australia at the moment.

Whitney Monaghan: It's the most popular show in Australia.

Susan Carland: It is huge. And so, trying to be part of the cultural moment, I have tried to watch it a couple of times. I found it so stressful watching people yell at each other and be mean to each other. There was no escapism for me in that. It was horrifying.

But obviously, I'm in the minority because people bloody love Married at First Sight. So what's going on there? Is the disjuncture with me? How do you find that relaxing?

Whitney Monaghan: Well, I think that people watch that show for a lot of different reasons, and sometimes it's just to be part of the conversation. You watch it because you want to relate to people in your life, in your workplace. You want to be able to go into work the next day and say, “Hey, what about that thing that happened on Married at First Sight last night?”

But yeah, for me, I think it's kind of an interesting thing because it's the most popular show in Australia, and perhaps when we're watching it, maybe we're thinking, “This is just a drama of people yelling at each other, and how ridiculous, and everyone is a horrible person on this show”.

But for me, I think that show is really about negotiating gender norms. It's about relationships. It's about what we think happy relationships and marriages and futures should look like. And so that show is actually telling us quite a lot, and when we have conversations about it, we're doing that process of negotiating the meanings and perhaps shaping and reshaping those norms.

Susan Carland: Which sounds very important and virtuous, which makes the things that I've been watching…

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Susan Carland: I cannot put any intellectual overlay. I just love home renovation shows back-to-back, just yet another renovation, and I think it is just the tidy, “This is a problem, now it's pretty and good. This is a problem, now it's pretty and good.” That's it. There's no greater message. There's no cognitive demand on me. I don't come out of it better. I don't think I come out of it worse. Life continues on.

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Susan Carland: There is no social commentary to be made here. I think what we've realised is I am, but a simple person, and perhaps you are engaging in things a bit more intellectually.

Whitney Monaghan: I feel like I could intellectualise your experience.

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Susan Carland: Okay. Tell me, I need it, go. What is it?

Whitney Monaghan: Well, I think there's something about taking something that's messy and then fixing it up into a nice-looking house, right? That's a reassuring kind of format that's kind of told and retold through those kinds of shows.

And I think that's probably another reason why people like them. Because it makes them feel good. Not just the content, but the kind of structure that it's consistently telling. You go into that knowing things are going to start off bad and –

Susan Carland: Chaos and order.

Whitney Monaghan: It's going to be chaotic, and then it's going to be ordered and beautiful and nice at the end.

Susan Carland: All our expert guests agreed that indulging in a little escapism isn't anything to feel bad about. It may even help us tap into something special and necessary.

Michael W Clune: On the path to escapism – and again, I believe that escaping our habitual mindsets is a kind of spiritual hygiene, really… And I compare it to meditation. I meditate every day.

And meditation puts me in touch with something that Buddhists call emptiness, which is very distant from the ordinary world. And I enter that space and I return refreshed and renewed with a different kind of perspective on things. So I think escapism is very crucial.

Yeah, I think definitely… I think games have the capacity to facilitate our movements from my own body and mind and history to that of someone or something else. And I feel like readers, people who play games, people who enjoy art, that's really a capacity we develop. We develop a kind of taste for slipping free of ourselves and our egos and everything that's going on with us and seeing the world through someone or something else's eyes.

Susan Carland: You mentioned that a desire or a need for escapism is actually a fundamental part of the human condition that we need it. It's a spiritual hygiene, as you said. Do you think the desire for escapism is becoming more pronounced in the modern world, or is it pretty much at levels that it's always been?

Michael W Clune: That's a really good question. And it's difficult to know in some ways because we just have so much more information of how people spend their leisure in recent years.

But it's hard for me to imagine that people haven't always wanted escape. I think in many ways it has traditionally taken the form of religion. It might seem strange to think of religion in terms of an escape, but earlier when I described meditation as a way of getting outside of myself, that's a way that many religious traditions have seen religious practises.

And so I think there's a continuum of different kinds. And we just talked about escapism versus addiction. I think we could really extend that. And on one pole, you might have religion and very serious religious practises, which after all are seeking to escape certain habits, certain desires, certain patterns, a certain egocentrism. Many religions have that at their core. You want to escape the self.

On the other hand, things like watching TV, playing games or reading literature. I don't want to say that religion is just the same as reading a book or playing a game. I don't think it is. I don't think people often practise it with the same seriousness, but I think it works with the same desire we all have, which is a sense that I think strengthens as we get older, that the world is becoming calcified, that my habits are shutting out aspects of reality that I used to when I was a child, perhaps have greater access to.

Susan Carland: Whatever you are seeking and however you're seeking it. Healthy escapism provides something we crave a happily ever after. Here's Whitney.

Do you think escapist entertainment can provide a sense of hope or optimism for the future?

Whitney Monaghan: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things we've been talking about is that some of these texts or pop culture kinds of phenomenons, they're all kind of based in a sense of hope for the future. They're based in goodness prevailing, and I think they do give us a sense of the world as being okay in the end.

And so I think they give us an attitude of hopefulness, but also they give us a conversation. We can have a conversation about those things, and that's where we can take the action into our engagement with escapist media into change or even just new ways of thinking.

Susan Carland: Yeah, because it's true, even escapist entertainment, even if it does have sometimes grim elements, it generally does end positively. It's the happy ending.

Whitney Monaghan: Yeah.

Susan Carland: Has there ever been an escapist TV series or film that hasn't ultimately had a happy ending?

Whitney Monaghan: Well, I mean, I would say that all film does give us a sense of escapism. TV does because it's taking us out of our everyday experience and letting us see the world through different perspectives.

But the things that we kind of more regularly associate with escapism, like blockbuster films and big fantasy narratives and things like that, they're often kind of tied up in that idea of a happy ending and a kind of closed narrative that finishes things off. And we can feel good at the end.

Susan Carland: Chaos and order.

Whitney Monaghan: Chaos and order.

Susan Carland: Yeah. Whitney, thank you so much for your time today.

Whitney Monaghan: Thanks for having me.

Susan Carland: So with order restored, we've come to the end of our series on escapism.

Thank you to all our guests in this series, Dr Whitney Monaghan, Dr Clem Bastow, Associate Professor Davide Orazi, and Professor Michael W Clune. You can learn more about their work by visiting our show notes. We'll be back next week with an all-new topic.

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