SpaceX or Ctrl+Space+Esc?

Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away.. there was Earth. Earth was the third planet from the star called the Sun. Earth was a green world populated by many species of plants, animals and other organisms, including humans. Humans, not unlike other species, had certain proclivities. Most humans preferred simple rather than difficult. Often they preferred simple rather than true. Most humans preferred convenient rather than painful. But where the threshold between pain and convenience was differed for each human. Some humans preferred a life of perpetual indulgence to short-term physical sensory pleasures without regard for the consequences - they were colloquially called hedonists. However, Hedonism as a term was misused in that way as it actually historically, more precisely meant the avoidance of pain rather than the pursuit of the opposite extreme, that is pleasure. Wellbeing, a concept often used in policy and law, was defined through the concepts of pleasure and suffering (which pain was an extreme form of). Happiness, another important concept for us, humans, was often subjectively read as either the lack of pain or the presence of pleasure, depending on the hedonistic proclivities of the subject. Some people preferred a shorter life of great pleasures (often likened to a supernova - “burn?bright, die young”) while others preferred a longer life which may not have been full of ‘subatomic’ joys but also avoided any great or continuous admissions of pain or suffering.

For a very long time in history humans had to undergo great hardships, and the human life generally started with the promise of invincibility which eventually would end in the tragedy of death, mourning, separation and/or loss. They came up with the term ‘the human condition’.’This is the human condition’ they would often say about living through consequences of some of the most challenging or tragic of events. Wanting to die but having to live after your beloved partner, parent, sibling, child or friend died was ‘the human condition’. Wanting to live while fighting a fatal decease after a life of indifference was ‘the human condition’. Feeling torturous pain because your longing for another was not met with mutual reciprocity was ‘the human condition’. Feeling a rush of blood and the need to re-examine one’s life purpose after being chased by a predator and surviving was ‘the human condition’. Having a lot and not knowing why you are still unhappy was ‘the human condition’. Asking oneself ‘what is the meaning of life?’ when your life is alright but may feel a bit repetitive, monotone or stale was ‘the human condition’.

The human condition had a lot to do with the proclivity and the need for a purpose, direction or what we often refer to as meaning in life (or at least the illusion for such a construct). Some people lived their lives with only one set purpose which they either felt they had or hadn’t achieved at their deathbed. Other people lived their lives without any one long-term set meaning or aim. There also were people who didn’t feel like they had found a meaning or that there was one to be found. And then there were people who power-sped through different meanings in a dedicated sequential manner, reaching milestone after another, recalibrating to once again aim, reimagine and reinvent themselves, their lives, their social and often physical surroundings on the way.

The latter process of searching and re-creating new purpose, direction and meaning may have been confusing, complicated, disorienting and even tortuous at times. Depending on a set of complex factors, some people sometimes were poorly equipped to navigate through this self-search and ended up spending long time in something akin a ‘limbo’ (literally meaning ‘border’), or in other words being stuck in a non-place or in between places, with no sense of spatial or temporal direction or orientation. This so called ‘identity crisis’ moment, where one is expected to pivot, became more prominent as some of the earlier historical hardships related to the lack of scientific knowledge, technology and automation were alleviated and ‘the lack of suffering’ was more greatly and evenly distributed, or democratised. This new leisure caused by the lack of constant struggle against many but small problems opened the gates to one’s ability to reinvent oneself outside of the boundaries of traditional limitations (e.g. reliance only on local climate and environment, reliance only on the family or kin units, reliance on tribal or local social groups and communities, reliance only on one’s native national economy and resources for personal growth and development). A big part of that self-reinvention was centred around the idea of ‘experience’ and ‘experiencing’. In order to understand who one were, they had to experience the world, what it had to offer, how they fit with it and what the most optimal compatibility between their inner self and the outer world was. This experiencing of the world took many different forms, often of consumption. Thus the consumerist and experience economies were born. To clarify, consumerisms has been around for a long time, but up to the industrial revolution only the few very privileged could indulge and only in a limited way, so perhaps instead of ‘born’ it was actually only ‘democratised’ and expanded as a phenomenon.

In the 1930s psychologists started using the term ‘escapism’ to denote the counter-intuitive process of trying to substitute the unpleasant, boring or painful experiences (or the human condition as such) with their pleasure-invoking counterparts, even if only temporarily, and even if only illusory / mentally. In no way was the 1930s the beginning of the process of escapism as we, humans, have been escaping the difficulties of reality, in general and our own separate specific and most particular realities, since before we as a species learnt how to speak, which the early cave drawings and other traces of early storytelling and artistic artefacts attest. But the beginning of the 20th century saw one of the more conscious attempts to define and record this observation, point of view or way of thinking, to try to understand and explain some of the less rationale behaviours that often ensue in the most desperate, dire and hopeless of circumstances - the running away from reality into a fantasy (the faculty of imagining impossible or improbable things, reflecting the subject’s conscious or unconscious wishes).

However, most of our escapisms are barely realised to be such. In fact we often use other words to describe them. ‘Escapades’ is an old word of similar root which albeit dismissive has a slightly more positive undertone. Another more daily phrase is ‘I need a break’. And if you don’t get the break you needed, you may even have a ‘breakdown’ (which is like a break which you cannot delay / forfeit). What we do when we take our break away from ‘reality’ is: watch, listen or feel something pleasurable - relaxing and relieving. Something that can take our minds away from our current predicament and can propel us into an imagined world, different and distinct from the one we are ‘living through’ at the moment. For that purpose we need a strong stimulus, or at least a stimulus stronger than our current reality saturates us with. Some people prefer to escape ‘internally’, while others prefer to escape ‘externally’. Some prefer an ‘active’ escape, while others prefer a ‘passive’ one. Some prefer to be away from people within some sort of a physical or virtual setting, while others prefer to be among people but to escape places or activities. In either case it has to be ‘not these particular people, places or activities’ that you are around of all the time. Perhaps it may be a call for variety (?) But not just any old variety, but the meta-variety - the variety of varieties, the richness which makes our lives worth living (again). We don’t just want to feel different as in the environment and the surroundings around us - we, ourselves, want to feel different as in who we are, who those environments and surroundings create / mould in us. We need to break away from the old us, with our old problems and complexities, and we need a simple (or simplified) new, perhaps lower resolution, vision for ourself and the world we inhabit. Perhaps this need to feel different is an instinctive adaptive evolutionary mechanism, an inherent necessity which helps us avoid our old self being naturally superseded through this meta-novelty (?)

And if it is a call for variety and some sort of evolutionary trigger related to novelty, how and why do these two interrelate, and for what purpose?

Some of the more immediate examples of escapism that come to mind include: daydreaming, getting drunk, getting high (or low) on drugs or gambling or anything else which changes your state of mind, or quite literally walking out on your life or your family or the people you live with or care for. However, escapism doesn’t stop there, it also includes things like: going to the cinema, being a die-hard fan of something or someone, in fact any type of idolisation, fetishising or fantasy indulgence, travelling and tourism, cheating on your partner or taking a break from the relationship to explore other avenues, or sometimes vice-versa getting into a relationship where you can give up your own free-will and are not required to make any decisions. Furthermore, clinical conditions like depression or other deep trauma states related to denial and withdrawal. The biggest difference with the clinical versions is that in the non-clinical versions reality is just suspended, rather than refused altogether and for all time (as well as potentially the difference between doing it voluntary as against non-voluntary).

Kids can be said to be both the natural socialisers but also the natural escapists. Both stuck in a world unrecognisable by adults but also so inviting of anyone who is willing to play along. Perhaps all we do is develop and propagate that behaviour as we grow up (?)

In 1945 the human species developed and used unprecedented up until that time first nuclear weapon. By 1950s nuclear weapons were available to more than one country in the world. This triggered the so called ‘arms race’, ‘iron curtain’ and ‘cold war’, culminating with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Space Race in 1960s. Whilst the arms race, the iron curtain, the Cold War, the spying and the Cuban Missile Crisis are all understandable outcomes from escalating aggression and military competition, the Space Race is slightly less apparent whilst to an extent understandable as the next frontier / advantage in a militarily technologically competing dichotomous world. Nevertheless it does somehow propel outside of the current reality at the time and feels perhaps a step too far, or more precisely a step too far-fetched? Given that up until that moment there were only a few successfully launched space objects and the computer that made the moon landing possible was only 16-bit (far away from being even at least one megabyte), the various failed attempts before the successful landing, and the risk-reward calculation (huge investments on both sides which resulted in very little outcome beyond technological advancements in space and information technologies as well as the national glory and pride) -

the space venture retrospectively feels like a fantasy which we as a species indulged in at the most dire of moments, perhaps as some form of distraction to curtail some of the ongoing at the time aggression and ferocious international competition? Quite literally it may have been the most global and literal form of escapism that our species had ever indulged in?

And here we are. It is 2022, more than 50 years from the first moon landing, more than 30 years since the Soviet Union collapse and the end of the ‘classical’ Cold War, we are standing at the precipice of a series of crises which may change but also potentially end the civilisation as we have known it up until this decade. This includes big ‘hard-border’ things like:

• the ever so escalating effects of climate change
• the potential World War III which may have already begun in Ukraine in 2014 without us yet catching up to the fact
• the associated energy crisis
• the looming economic crisis or even the potential collapse of the economic system as we know it

But also the more fine-grain ‘soft-border’ things like:

• the post-covid lifestyle changes
• the associated return to the car and the withdrawal from public transport, and the resulting CO2 emissions
• the return to suburbia away from central areas which are proving unaffordable due to land monopolies combined with the ever-growing pressures from the disproportionate distribution of people into cities against rural and smaller town and village populations
• the ever-growing migration of populations globally which combined with the ever-growing financial inequalities between the richest and the poorest give rise to local socio-economic and cultural tensions, populist, nationalistic and right-wing movements
• the associated uneven distribution of resources
• the associated devolution of currency as such
• the ever-growing reliance on IoT and the associated technocratic loss of privacy, freedom of speech and human rights

And at the same time with all of the above, we are yet again reaching out for the next set of fantasies:

• the almost dogmatic and blindly unchallenged belief mirrored by investment in sustainable energy tech (wind and solar only)
• the belief that we do not need to seek ways to decrease our consumption for as long as we are seeking to change our energy production methods and we do our individual recycling
• the belief that the electric car will somehow resolve all of our environmental crises (including climate, energy, pollution and built environment quality related)
• the belief that we do not have to take care of this world because we can somehow magically all travel to, colonise and terraform other worlds without even being able to keep the beautiful heavenly world we’ve been handed completely free and turnkey ready in some sort of a reasonable balance
• the belief that robotics and neurotech advancements will change and resolve all our societal issues, inequalities, problems related to the lack of social cohesion, local and global tensions
• the belief that we all have equal rights while at the same time that we can resolve our economic crises through handouts and / or taxing the bottom 99% while letting big corps and billionaires reign loose, untaxed and influencing our laws and political systems as well as elections completely unaccounted and without any consequence
• the belief that governments and public institutions are collapsing and instead of fixing them somehow the private sector which barely has any alignments with non-private public benefit will be able to take over and do a better job at things like public health, education, public transport and other common goods
• the belief that we will somehow reach more equal and fair societies not through seeking financial equality but through seeking social justice, judging people by their race, sexuality, gender and other such, instead of their merit, skills, abilities, experience, knowledge, what they can contribute and how they can make a difference, as well as taking care of the less fortunate and the people in need

All of the above and other which may not be on that list may all be new ways of global escapisms: daydreaming, fairytales, outright fantasies and/or pathologies (?)

If you are interested to find out more on the topic of escapism and to continue with the venture of exploring it and identifying the different forms of escapisms - whether individual or collective, past, present or future, short or long term, local or global, positive beneficial or negative pathological - I would recommend reading Slavoj ?i?ek’s analysis of Lacan’s object-cause of desire (objet petit a) which sets a theoretical scene and a strong foundation / framework for any such inquiries.

Whilst not explored in this essay / article, it may be that escapisms are themselves inescapable, or irreducible, and in fact perhaps all in all positive beneficial for us as individuals or as a species in most scenarios. Allowing us to take a pause, recalibrate and pivot, explore new directions, new ways, new ideas. It may even be a mechanism that distinguishes us from other species who keep on going, following their instincts no matter how dire or great their circumstance or outcome.

Nevertheless, it does beg the question, do escapisms have a cumulative positive effect when they occur at a global scale rather than individual (?) Without a conscious subject, does escapism result in contributing towards the potential collapse or destruction of the world as a whole (as does indulgence in consumption despite the climate change crisis is currently) or does it open the possibility for a different rather unthinkable at that moment future -the ultimate act of creativity (such as the space race which put an end to an otherwise escalating arms race in the 1960s) (?) Perhaps even equivalent to metaphysical events alike paradox or magic (?) Furthermore, why do we need to periodically escape (?) How did we evolve this behaviour - or perhaps did we have it to begin with and we haven’t de-evolved as we gained the consciousness we enjoy today (?) Should we be encouraging all, some or none of our escapisms, or looking to get rid of all, some or none (?) Is it a bug or a feature (?) How much importance or significance or value should we be attributing to these processes individually and collectively, locally and globally (?) If it is an inevitable feature of our thinking and behaviour, should we not look to integrate it, make use or the necessary omissions or concessions where appropriate, into our cultures, education, protocols, interpersonal and international relations and behaviours (?)

To use an old metaphor, Escapism is the elephant in the room we are not acknowledging nor are we brave enough to explore to understand. It is a blindspot that plays out in all types of ways in our daily lives as well as in the long and global term. We can continue indulging in escaping from acknowledging escapism, or we can finally attempt to engage with it, understand it and come to terms with it.