By the way this is what happens when you listen to David Bowie in the shower.
This is a silly question, of course it can.
What, you’ve never enjoyed a movie or a tv show?
You’ve never had a bad day, and then watched something that made you laugh despite it?
If this is the case, I suggest consuming different media, because what you’re watching must not be doing it. Do you want recommendations?
Throughout all of history people use story and song to transport the mind to other places, to make real what isn’t.
Entertainment needs escapism like bread needs butter.
Yes because you forget when you Fokus.
I think it’s not just possible, but easy, because entertainment cannot grant some true, genuine escape in the first place, so we understand mere distraction by it, of varying degree. Actually escaping the society would mean taking some real action, like packing your stuff (if that) and leaving for the woods or some other remote location where it’s you and the wilderness. Sitting in an building likely surrounded by other buildings, most likely connected to the sprawling electrical grid to power the actually hi-tech devices required to enjoy the entertainment that is very likely streamed to you in real time, produced in an actually hi-tech environment by other members of society, all dressed in some industry-produced PJs or something, enjoying something ultra-processed or even delivered to you after a couple of clicks over virtual buttons on your pocket super-computer that you swap for a new one at most every few years - that is pretty far from escaping society.
But you can take your mind off of it for a while.
For example, if I’m tired of all the AI and wars and right-wing aging people taking power, but play something like No Man’s Sky, flying around in space and digging some stuff and building my ships and as of recently decorating my space stations, I occupy my mind and let it cling to something else, often managing to mute the thoughts filling me with dread, even for a couple dozen minutes.
Something less peaceful surprisingly can serve purpose, too, by similarly hijacking my attention and though process and causing my nervous system to respond to different things: like watching Mad Max: Fury Road, which is pretty far from anything calm or soothing, especially when you take its lore into account, but watching it, I can almost guarantee I’ll be glued to the screen, following the action, feeling all sorts of things for the characters, thinking things of them and their actions, and actually feeling good by the end of it, almost cathartic because I’ve been emotionally shaken and stirred similarly to an amusement ride.
And surprisingly still, anything that is filled with hope and faith in humanity almost always makes me feel worse, because it actually reminds me more of the issues that are being ignored or mismanaged or even exacerbated. I remember reading Project Hail Mary and feeling heartbroken and desperate over some of the events that seemed so unrealistic and far from the reality already seen during the 2020s disasters, because I just knew that the kind of response depicted would be too big of an ask.
Escapism is just distracting yourself from life and worries, so yes, it can. I can read a book or listen to a song and become untethered from this world and part of a new one that only exists for me.
If you took something like D&D and played with others by creating your own world and rules then I think its possible. Take music, if you take the nuggets and kindle your own flame then even if it was propaganda you learned to escape.
Counter point. Most westerners would use the music scale we have (can’t recall it) to create music. While ignoring the many many others they were never taught or don’t know about.
In that regards they can’t truly escape the system they are in.
I expect similar for D&D (ignoring its a company) any rules you make up are based on versions of current rules. None would really be a revolutionary idea, and if they were the person coming up with them and players probably wouldn’t like it as they arnt what they are used to under the current system.
At a certain point, you’ll realize that all your great ideas have occured to someone else.
Timing is everything.
Tell that to my box of coconut cookies, my belly and The Office.
Cookies, agreed but only in that good food can make all problems seem less present but I wouldn’t think the office would feel like an escape to me.
One person’s escapism is another person’s reality 😔
Fair! I wonder if it also has to do with what you compare with. Some segments, elements, in The Office make me completely disappear mentally. They make me forget my mental illness, those aspects of my life that feel miserable. On the contrary, watching for instance true crime (if that even is entertainment?) pulls me even further down. I can’t enjoy it, because for me, it just amplifies the horrors of life. And when it comes to music, I mostly enjoy listening to genres and lyrics that don’t obviously reflect life: Blind Guardian, Kraftwerk, Perturbator, Eluveitie, Rhapsody, Aimer.
No, because Capitalism commodifies desire, including the desire to escape, the means to escape, and the action of escaping.
I realize this is presented as a showerthought, but it is actually related to a very serious philosophical topic regarding how modern capitalism has captured the minds and souls of mankind.
Some interesting reading on the subject:
Deterritorialized Desire: Capitalism and Resistance
The seminal work on this topic:
Who says shower thoughts are only whimsy?
The void calls in beating of the water and fog of heat to find the greatest questions we have ever faced.
Like seriously why do shower curtains want to hug us so badly while we are in there?!
Literally a physics question without a true answer still.Thanks for the reading.
Someone to save us, someone to follow
Someone to shame us, some brave Apollo
Someone to fool us, someone like you?Please, don’t stake our lives on a Saviour Machine.
ok, I’ll stop, but was either guess the particular Bowie that triggered the thought?
Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seats with the clearest view
And she’s hooked to the silver screen
But the film is A sadd’ning bore
For she’s lived it ten times or moreI mean he really wanted us to question our entertainment and what we felt was normal and embrace the odd.
Bowie has an amazing discography.
After about 10 minutes of pondering, I have a lot of responses to this question. But no answers.
Right? Im glad i am somewhere that i am not paying the water bill.
I suppose it depends on how complete your personal need for escape is. Sometimes, merely a different role in a less obviously toxic universe is sufficient, or maybe being faced with truly existential threats that you can be confident will be overcome within the timeframe of the work you’re escaping into.
So not escape but just a belief that things can be different.
It seems some of us also need to imagine such a different reality from ours to even be able to believe the change as possible. Is it not a bit tragic to think we would need nukes / magic / aliens in order for us to believe humanity to finally be slightl ly different? Like even at such extremes we expect humanity to still act the same.
See, or perhaps that is just our current bias from our current society corrupting our imagination. A failure to see something truly different since we would fail to relate.
We are led like cattle.
My response: be the weirdest cattle they had to try to lead