Wednesday, October 27, 2010

5 Different Ways of Escaping Real Life

Everybody tries to escape life, remember the Cormac McCarthy quote. People have different ways of doing it, and to some extent the means of escape is a sign of personality assets and defects. What does your escape mechanism say about you?

Romance fiction
This is an escape for those frustrated, for whom real life relationships are never satisfactory because the person they are with does not make them happy. These are the women who go into relationships expecting that some guy is going to, or should, make everything in their lives perfect and protect them from ever feeling unhappy about anything ever again.

Insulting commercials
Why the fuck do you have an animated lizard advertising insurance? Are toddler’s insuring their pacifiers now? Nobody questions it, either so the whole world must think this kind of thing appropriate. The reason they do it is because a fantasy animated creature automatically shuts down the grown-up part of the brain and switches on the infantile picture-book entertainment part so that you watch and accept instead of thinking about, real-life adult matters like money and property. The idea is to make you into a kid again so they can take advantage.

Mexican Immigrants
Yes, those undocumented workers, so loathed and despised by the right wing in American politics, they serve as an escape for many Americans. They are here because of Americans who  think they are too good to pick lettuce, and clean their own homes. Everybody sees themselves as belonging to the upper middleclass, or are longing for it so badly that the idea of doing menial work is unpalatable to them.

Science Fiction, for the most part
The genre, like most genres of everything, is mostly shit, built on stories that have nothing to do with science, written for people who know nothing about science, and with no themes that apply to real life. It serves only as an escape for people who are too ignorant to know what bad writing is. Speculative fiction is written usually by people who know very little about the real world and who can relate only to their own daydreams. It’s the attempt to circumvent your ignorance of the world around by making up your own worlds.

Marriage, how you see it
Your fairy-tale happily ever after lie. Of course, nobody is going to admit to being naive to the point where they actually believe that everything will turn out perfectly now, but they do. Deep down they think that marriage will change their lives for the better, which it doesn’t because can’t, and when they find this out they switch their expectations to having kids. After 3 or 4 kids they still aren’t happy so then it’s onto the divorce and the second marriage and so on and so forth on in perpetuity.

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