Escapism and reality

"Modern world is full of insecurity, fear, war, worry, and all the rest of it, and that people want to escape" 

                                                                     - By Sam

                                                          (From-The Third level 

                                                        written by Jack Finney)                                                         

Insecurities, wars, worries, stress and anxiety can lead people to fall into isolated zones. People end up loosing their minds in relaxing but non-existing palaces like Charley in the story ' The Third Level' 

Let me explain in short what happened with Charley. Charley is a 31 year old man, who decided to take the subway home from work at the grand Central station since it was a short cut. The grand central station  has only  two levels. Charley took the stairs hoping to enter the first level, but ended up in the third level which didn't exist. The shocking thing was that  the ambience and the people in the third level were totally different from the other levels. When Charley glanced at a newspaper  near by he found the year to be 1894 which was 20 years before his present. Charley walked out  the way he had entered and returned to his present time. When he narrated the whole episode to his psychiatrist friend, Sam, Sam suggested that it might be  'waking dream wish fulfilment' and that Charley might have imagined the whole thing because he was insecure and wanted temporary a refuge from reality.

Like Charley a lot us also tend to knowingly or unknowingly escape reality. According Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, 'wish fulfilment', is the idea that when wishes can't or won't be fulfilled in our waking lives we tend to fulfill them in worlds that we consider as reality. His theory suggests that human behaviour is influenced by unconscious memories, thoughts and urges. This theory also proposes that the psyche comprises of 3 aspects : the Id, ego, super-ego. 

The Id is completely unconscious. 

The ego is the conscious mind.

The super-ego is both conscious and unconscious.

In Charley's case, his conception of the third level is based on his memories of his grandfather's life in Galesburg, Illinois. Charley describes it as a wonderful place in a peaceful world as the first world war was 20 years off and world war two over forty years in the future. This shows that he wanted to escape the reality, so he might have dreamt the whole thing.

We are no different from Charley. We try to escape the world with help of technology. It's impossible for us to get bored when we have TVs, mobiles ect. with us. For how long can technology help us. Mobiles can not provide true happiness. Escapism won't solve our problems, we need to face reality. 

Let me provide one tip that might help you cope with escapism. If you use escapism as way to hide from reality, escapism is probably your defence mechanism. It is your way to protect yourself from the things you want to escape. Try to identify what you are trying to escape and why.

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