‘What Happens Next?’: What Are We Trying to Escape?

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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.

Davide Orazi: The beauty of escapes, the beauty of accessing these extraordinary realms, is that the experience is temporary.

Clem Bastow: I think that that was really something noticeable about the last two or three years, was that there was a couple of years there, yeah, where it was just, escapism was just imagine if the world was nice.

Michael Clune: So if you understand that, you understand what addiction is about, you're hitting that slot machine and you're just seeing the numbers and you're excited to see what's going to come up next.

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Susan Carland: Let's start this episode with a quick trip back in time.

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Susan Carland: We're going back to high school English class where you've been assigned Aldous Huxley's dystopian classic, Brave New World.

As you remember, of course, it's a book about a society called the World State where escapism reigns supreme.

In the London of Huxley's imagination, some 500 years from now, citizens are constantly consuming the mind-numbing drug soma, and distracting themselves with nonstop entertainment and diversions. As a consequence, they've sacrificed their individuality and lost touch with the harsh realities of the world.

Look! There you are, writing a very insightful essay about the ways a society that prioritises pleasure and avoids discomfort will go downhill fast, and how you're sure it will never come to that in real life. Great work, I bet that will age really well.

Okay, back to the future.

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Susan Carland: Oh dear. I hate to say it, but I'm not sure your essay has aged well after all.

It's never been easier to access entertainment and amusements. You can stream infinite movies and television shows to a device in your pocket or any screen in your home. You can connect with people who share your interests instantly online and start the world's biggest Dungeons & Dragons game. You can buy the next book on your to-read list and it's ready to go on your Kindle in seconds. And once you finish that one, you can immediately buy the next one, and the next one, and the next one.

If reality gets a bit much, and let's face it, it is a bit much at the minute, you can tune out at any time, but is that a good thing?

Today on the podcast we're discussing escapism. Everyone wants to get away from it all sometimes, even if it's just to binge-watch Married at First Sight. But what happens when you have too much of a good thing? Keep listening to find out what happens next.

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Whitney Monaghan: Hi, my name is Dr Whitney Monaghan, I'm a lecturer in communications and media studies in the School of Media, Film & Journalism. I'm the co-convenor of the Monash Gender and Media Lab, and I spend a lot of my time watching reality TV.

Susan Carland: Whitney, welcome to the podcast.

Whitney Monaghan: Thanks for having me.

Susan Carland: How would you define escapism?

Whitney Monaghan: Escapism. It's such an interesting concept, isn't it? The idea that we need to, or want to, escape from something in our real lives or in reality. But I'm interested in the question of, what are we escaping to?

Susan Carland: Mm.

Whitney Monaghan: Where are we going? What are we doing with things that gives us that feeling of escapism, and are we really escaping?

Susan Carland: Dr Michael W Clune is a writer and critic, and a professor at Ohio's Case Western Reserve University. He believes that when we seek out escapist activities, we're actually seeking to shift our way of thinking.

Michael Clune: It's an interesting idea, sometimes people think of escapism as escaping reality. My own view is that it's less about trying to get outside of reality, because reality is a very mysterious and deep and complex thing, it's more about trying to get out of our habitual mind states and the frames of reference, which produce a constricted and reduced picture of reality for us.

Susan Carland: Mhmm.

Michael Clune: And so different ways of getting out of that, and that can be something like your job, it could be something like relationship patterns, it can be something like social norms, and escapism is a means of perforating those habits and that mental state and getting outside of it.

Susan Carland: That's such a great way to put it, to perforate it. I love that image.

Clem Bastow: Hi, my name's Clem Bastow, I am a screenwriting researcher and cultural critic from Melbourne. You may see my work in The Guardian and The Saturday Paper, and I'm just about to hand in my PhD on the intersection between autism, screenwriting, and Hollywood action films.

Susan Carland: As a cultural critic, Clem spent a lot of time analysing the latest trends on screen, both big and small. Given the state of the world recently, it's little wonder that our desire to escape is reflected in the content we consume. Sometimes we're looking for a better place than the one we really inhabit, and maybe even a better world entirely.

Clem Bastow: What's been interesting in the last couple of years, obviously we're still in a pandemic, but I think in those first few years where everything felt very acute and very scary, what was interesting was how much escapist media became very cosy. I don't think people wanted to imagine, for example, a global pandemic, so people like me who maybe used to watch Steven Soderbergh's Contagion regularly –

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Clem Bastow: – suddenly didn't want to watch that anymore!

And so I think that was really interesting, and I actually think now there's a bit of a pushback against it, where we've come out the other side and maybe people are finding, for example, Ted Lasso a bit too soft and cuddly. We're longing for things that challenge our worldviews a bit more.

But I think that that was really something noticeable about the last two or three years, was that there was a couple of years there, yeah, where it was just, escapism was just, “imagine if the world was nice.”

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Susan Carland: Escapist activities give us the chance to run away in search of a better time too. It doesn't matter if it never really existed.

Davide Orazi is an Associate Professor of Marketing in Monash University's Business School. As part of his research, he studies a phenomenon called pseudo-nostalgia.

Davide Orazi: It's basically largely like nostalgia in that it is a sense of longing for a space and a time that is no longer accessible, that is meaningful for us, with the difference that we have not experienced it. The main differentiator is that the pseudo part is that we've never been there. So if I'm longing for the Middle Ages because it's a time of heroes and chivalry, that is pseudo-nostalgia. I have not been there in the first place, but still, there is something that's appealing to me.

Susan Carland: And so do you think that pseudo-nostalgia is a form of escapism?

Davide Orazi: Partially, I would say, as every movement towards another place, it tends to be idealised. So again, the Middle Ages, it's something that we remember based on attributes that probably we seek. So we're not concentrating on the fact there were pandemics and the average survival rate was very low, we are looking at a bright part of it. So in a way, we are trying to focus, I don't know, if I'm disenamored about current values and we think, “Oh, back in the day, everything was much more meaningful, much more heroic, there were opportunities.”

And so in a way, yes, we are trying to seek something that we miss in everyday life and escape into another era, another time that is more inspiring.

Susan Carland: Pseudo-nostalgia seems to be quite common in our culture at the moment, but then when I was thinking about it I realised it's common beyond just Australian culture. For example, not long ago I was watching an extremely popular series out of Turkey that was very lightly based on history, but it was phenomenally popular from Turkey to Pakistan, and what I've noticed that seems to unite all these pseudo-nostalgia approaches, I suppose, is that they're incredibly generous with the truth. It paints a very idealised form of what it would've been like back then.

Is that your sense as well? Does pseudo-nostalgia seem to be very overly good?

Davide Orazi: Yeah, absolutely. Because, again, as a form of escapism in a way, you want to escape in a better place, right? If you're bored, you want to go in a place that's more exciting. If you're dissatisfied, you want to go in a place in which something on offer is better.

Even with Stranger Things, it's in the ‘80s, so everything that you see is like fashion, the flashy clothes, music, and great bands at the time, like Metallica, but nobody tells you about Tiananmen Square or the AIDS crisis or the fact that John Lennon was shot.

Susan Carland: Mm.

Davide Orazi: Yeah, there is a bit of that discourse about the American/Russian Cold War, but again, it's all reframed and very heroic and single view, the Russians are evil guys, so there's no leeway.

Everything… it's very heroicised and very narrative in that sense.

Susan Carland: If you listened to our influencers episode earlier this season, you won't be surprised to learn that we're often seeking better people too, even if our relationship with them is only in our heads. Clem's experienced this personally.

Clem Bastow: I often step back from my daydreaming and go, perhaps I should just go and see my actual friends instead of thinking about this world in which I'm besties with, for example, all of the actors whose work I've been watching constantly for the last four years doing this PhD. They're not my actual friends.

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And I had the same thing during the pandemic. During lockdown, we had the ABC on so much, and I remember my partner at the time just having to gently remind me, “It's okay if we go out, your friends at the ABC are not going to be sad if you don't watch the 7pm bulletin.”

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Susan Carland: Michael Rowland will understand if you're not there.

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Clem Bastow: That's it.

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Susan Carland: Our to-do lists are too long, our wallets are too empty, and our tempers are too short. And now what's this? Mark Zuckerberg's releasing another app we have to learn about.

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Susan Carland: It's too much! No wonder we want to all just get away from it all, even if it's just a Netflix marathon on the couch. But was Aldous Huxley right? Is this behaviour a slippery slope? What happens when our escapist tendencies go too far?

For one thing, there's some internalised social shame we maybe experience when we indulge.

It's interesting, isn't it? Because often when we speak about, I binge-watched whatever for six hours on a Saturday and I feel so gross that I can't believe I did it, and there's a bit of shame.

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Susan Carland: But it's interesting because if I said to you I was reading an amazing book, I couldn't put it down –

Clem Bastow: Yeah.

Susan Carland: I read it for six hours straight, I would never say to you that I was binge-reading.

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Susan Carland: This is just being immersed in a book. And no one, I think generally, no one would see that as a negative thing.

Clem Bastow: Yeah, I think there is still so much baggage around television.

From the moment it was invented, was it television that was the opiate of the masses, or has everything been the opiate of the masses at some point? I don't know.

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Clem Bastow: But I think it still has that baggage attached to it that it's, yeah, it's a slovenly thing. And I think, yeah, the binge... To your point, the negative connotations of bingeing is absolutely apt, it is seen as a kind of value-free activity.

Susan Carland: We also run the risk of not being able to return to reality as cleanly as we may have hoped.

As part of his research, Davide studies live action role-playing.

For people listening who don't know, can you explain what LARPing, or live action role-playing, is?

Davide Orazi: Yes. So my great hope is that by now, after Stranger Things and a number of podcasts, like Critical Role, everybody knows what a normal role-playing game is, but in case.

In a role-play game, it's the classic game in which a bunch of people and friends gather around a table with character sheets and manuals — and as a matter of fact, I was actually playing Dungeons & Dragons, the original second edition, yesterday –

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Davide Orazi: – and simulate action using dice and other character sheets. And so it's like a core narration, but everything happens in your mind.

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Davide Orazi: In live action role-playing, we are replacing imagination, just like living the dream. So you actually, you don't interpret your character. You dress as a character, you don a suit of armour, you have a sword, and you're playing with another 300 people in a castle.

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Davide Orazi: Live action role-playing is a version of role-playing games in which we are removing the imagination component, or rather supplanting it, with a lived experience.

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Davide Orazi: So I am embodying my character, I'm dressing and donning a suit of armour with a sword, and I'm playing in an evocative location, so probably a castle, if it's a mediaeval LARP or a former movie set. Part of our research in Spain was in the desert of Almeria in a Western Hollywood set.

And you interact for three days as if it was an improvisational play, like improvisational theatre, but everything happened physically.

So the experience is different, it's more intense, it's more visceral, and it allows you to explore aspects of yourself and your corporate reality as well.

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Susan Carland: But sometimes it's hard to separate fantasy from real life once your experience has ended. Davide and his fellow researchers have come across a phenomenon known as reality bleed.

Davide Orazi: The three main types of bleeds that we have quoted in a recent research paper, like reality bleed is in general the aggregate term, but by “bleed” we are defining the process for which when you are entering one of these worlds, these alternative realms, and you spend time being somebody else and experiencing gathering logics and norms.

So when you come back to your everyday life, regardless of how satisfied you are with that, it's a form of longing, almost like a nostalgia of the experience that you had. It's not too different from if you spent, I don't know, two weeks in Italy, and you travel from Florence to Rome and you meet all these people and travel through history. When you come back there's some sort of longing for that experience.

And so bleed is exactly that, but for a place that does not exist and for people that do not exist, they were contained over three days, and now you come back and your mind is missing something that's no longer. So that is bleed, and it's a powerful force because it allows you to reassess logics and norms.

Susan Carland: I was just going to say, sometimes when I finish a particularly gripping book of fiction or a TV show, I find that I'm missing the characters or the place that it was set, but often the characters. Is that reality bleed or is that a different thing to what you're talking about with, say, LARPing?

Davide Orazi: It's related, I think it's called longing for parasocial relationships. Somebody, I think Russell and Sean talked about that, but the logic is the same. You become attached to the people that you have lived this extraordinary experience for days and the places that you have navigated and explored, and now you come back and all your thinking is, I want to go back.

And also sometimes you have this conflict between, oh, I live in this world that has these certain norms and logics, but in that experience to where more inspiring things, or even completely different ways of living, human-robot interactions, we don't really have that much here, but there's some LARPs that simulate, like Westworld, that force you to consider, how would I behave with a sanctioned android without the limits of consciousness and so on?

And because you've never really interrogated yourself about these questions, and they're big ones, they're just there in the back of your mind, you are in front of your computer, you're writing, and suddenly, so are androids alive? Do they have a consciousness? And you're like, okay, this is a lot.

Susan Carland: But could the consequences of escapism go beyond feeling a bit gross about how you spent the past weekend or sitting at your desk scaring yourself with existential questions about robots? Can escapism become an addiction?

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: If it becomes an alternative to your current existence and not a break that you use to reassess your current situation of just some energy back, then it becomes a little bit more problematic. Video gaming addiction would be one of the most classic examples. If you spend 16 hours playing World of Warcraft you may not want to admit it, but you have.

Susan Carland: Culturally, we associate video games in particular with addiction. Michael is uniquely qualified to weigh in here.

Michael Clune: I have experience with both. As far as addiction goes, I was a heroin addict for a number of years. I've been clean for 21 years, but I was an addict to drugs from the age of 14 about until I got clean at 26, so I have thorough experience with addiction. And in terms of escapism, it's something that's always fascinated me, something I feel is vital to life, and something I've written about both in terms of computer games, in terms of literature, and art, and music, all of which I feel to be different forms of escapism.

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

Michael 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…

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Susan Carland: I want to go deeper into the conversation with Michael in part two of this series. For now, let's talk video games.

Michael Clune: I would say there's different kinds of games. The numbers of genres of games since I've been around have proliferated and multiplied, and there are some games I feel like can have an addictive tendency. The games that fascinate me tend not to, and I'll explain what I mean pretty briefly.

There's some neuroscientific research that I find very persuasive based on my own experience that suggests that the most basic form of addiction is gambling, just waiting for that little flash of something to appear.

And there's a great anecdote about gambling addiction which I think is fascinating, for the true gambling addict, when they hit the jackpot of the slot machine, they get depressed because what that means is it's going to be a weight and a delay before they can hit that slot machine again.

If you understand that, you understand what addiction is about. You're hitting that slot machine and you're just seeing the numbers, and you're excited to see what's going to come up next.

There are games that put you into loops where you're just looking under little boxes and trees and waiting for that next little flap. Those kinds of games I feel can be addictive.

The games that fascinate me, which we often call role-playing games, are games in which there's a different world that's created and you explore the world through the game. And those games I don't find to be addictive, they operate according to quite a different logic.

So while I would definitely hesitate to say that games as such are addictive, I think there are some types of games that do activate the same kinds of dopamine cycles that drugs and gambling can do.

But I would say along that path, that desire for escapism, along that path it's possible certain pitfalls can open up and certain kinds of escapes can decay into addictive cycles. So something, for example, many people like to use drugs recreationally. They might use, and I had friends who would use drugs, even hard drugs, once in a while, never get addicted to them, it'd be a little escape for them.

And it was like that for me in the beginning as well, but eventually, it hijacked my brain so that it was now, far from being an escape from the ordinary, it had imprisoned me in a far more constricting version of our habitual mind state, from which there was literally no escape until the police came and locked me up.

So I feel like many kinds of escapism have, and that desire for escapism has, the potential to decay into an addictive pattern or cycle. So that's how I would think about it, at least from my own experience.

Susan Carland: So are we all lab rats frantically hitting a button until we get our next dopamine hit? And was Huxley right, are we headed for a not-so-brave new world full of brain-dead couch potatoes? Next week on What Happens Next?, we'll talk about the upsides of stepping outside reality just for a moment.

Thank you to all our guests on today's episode, 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 part two of this series.

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