Another blog post, reproduced here in full, but go to substack if you want the pictures and such.
On Writing, Fiction, and Modern Escapism
Do our stories bring us down to earth, or keep our heads in the clouds?
“Interesting Reading” by Theodor Kleehaas, c. 1890
Dear reader, it’s time to read my writing about writing.
I’ve got a complicated relationship with the ol’ written word. I grew up having my parents read Lord of the Rings and other classics to me before I could even speak. While I come from a long line of rural southerners without a ton of education or wealth, I truly admire that my parents were both readers, despite the anti-reading social stigma in their class, and worked hard to pass that on to me.
As soon as I could read, I became obsessed with the written word. I remember clearly how my mother would always brag about how I could read and pronounce the word ‘indubitably’ by the time I was three years old. (She still brags about this, occasionally.)
Growing up, I lived a typical ‘millennial nerd-life’ so to speak. Both of my parents were working, and I had no siblings, so I spent a lot of time alone. As I’ve written elsewhere, much of my time I spent gaming; the time I didn’t spend gaming was mostly spent with my nose in a book.
Fantasy and science fiction, speculative fiction as it’s now called, gripped me far more than anything else. I still read non-fiction, especially scientific reading, since my mother had a career in laboratory science, so it felt relevant to me.
With hindsight, it’s obvious that my obsession with fantasy in the broader sense - worlds beyond the one I am actually in - was perhaps not the most salutary way to spend my time as a child. Instead of playing outside, socializing, or learning discipline, I took every spare moment I could to escape the physical realm and into the realm of imagination.
I’m not attempting to bemoan my situation overmuch though.
Since the 70s or so, the two-income household has been the norm, and leads to the majority of kids spending very little time with their parents. Historically, this was not the norm at all. We live in a society of orphans, raised by the state more than their parents.
Either way, one concept that helped me make sense of what I was doing as a kid is the emotional pattern sometimes called the ‘Leaving Pattern’. I first encountered it in the book The Five Personality Patterns, but it’s an older psychological pattern first typified by Wilhelm Reich, the schizoid typology. Whatever you call it, the basic idea is as follows:
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A child, for one reason or another, grows up feeling unsafe in their body / in the physical world
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As a defense, they end up ‘leaving’ their body, often going into an imaginary world, or physically withdrawing into themselves
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In order to function in the world, they create a persona that is split off from their ‘true self,’ and keep said true self in the fantasy world
Now I’ll be the first to admit that psychology is a spotty science at best, and it’s good not to read too much into these sorts of types. You can quite easily become trapped by an abstract concept, and psychology can never capture all of what a human being is. However, I still find myself relating to this pattern quite strongly, and thinking about it has helped me combat some of my problematic habits.
Okay, But… Writing?
“A Man at his Desk” by Salomon Koninck, c. 1655
Now you might be thinking, ‘Ok thanks for the dramatic sob story Thomas, how does this relate to writing again?’
Growing up, due to my love for and even obsession with reading, my career dreams such as they existed revolved around becoming a writer. I felt that good books had taught me so much, had saved me from a difficult world, and truly given me a reason to live, when I didn’t have much of one during the worst parts of my youth.
I dreamt of writing a book series that could reach out to other young children and grip them the same way. Teach them good values via stories, help provide solace in their pain, and save them the way I thought good books and stories had saved me.
Ironically, I’ve come to question this story a bit.
As I outlined above, I’m not so sure that getting deep into fantasy, science fiction, and gaming was good for me as a youth. In fact, I’m pretty confident it led to some bad outcomes for me later on. When you always cope by retreating into fantasy, you set yourself up for delayed maturation in the ‘real world,’ at the least.
Many young people who get obsessed with fantasy worlds essentially never grow up, permanently stuck in an adolescent phase. You see this quite often nowadays with Marvel, or Disney, or other major commercialized fantasy worlds.
So I have had to take a step back and ask myself: is it truly helping the world to add yet another fictional realm for people to escape into? What if I simply perpetuate the tendency for people to ‘leave’ themselves and cause the same problems I’ve had to deal with as I grew up and was forced to confront reality?
These musings are a large part of why I ended up starting this blog, and done much of my writing in a more non-fiction, ‘serious’ realm so to speak, where I’m trying to confront real problems instead of go into a fantasy realm.
I’ll also admit that, having tried to write speculative fiction, it is quite difficult. I’ve started more novels than I can remember, only to peter out a little ways into them. Part of what has stopped me is my philosophical wranglings above, but it would be dishonest not to admit that a lack of discipline and commitment plays into it as well.
And if we zoom out from just writing, looking at the modern world as a whole, it seems to me that with the rise of phones, social media, and the digital realm generally, we are increasingly plunging ourselves into the abstract, the mental, the imaginary. We are leaving our bodies en masse in favor of intellectualized distractions, artificial connection, and disembodied dopaminergic entertainment.
A large part of my own path to healing has been learning to embrace my body, the sensations from it, and ground within the physical world, instead of spending all of my time running away from uncomfortable sensations.
While I love fantasy, science fiction, video games, and other imaginative delights, I can’t help but see these things more and more as junk food, as an unhealthy indulgence that may be good to have occasionally, but certainly should not be the core of an adult life.
And yet… I still remember being a young child, and diving into my first few fantasy worlds. I remember being exposed to depths of being and understanding that I had no conception of beforehand. I remember learning about heroism, about sacrifice, and about the depths of love that human beings can attain, with the right measure of wisdom and courage.
I remember finding something holy within the pages of these fictional worlds, something that I still feel resonates deep in my heart to this day.
Ultimately, as Jonathan Pageau, Jordan Peterson, and many other Christian writers have discussed, stories are fundamental to who we are as humans. When Christ was presented with dilemmas during His teaching, He would often teach others by telling stories, or parables. There’s a way in which stories can get at a truth deeper than ‘reality’ can, a way in which the narrative realm speaks to the deepest parts of us, makes us come alive. We desperately need stories just in order to make sense of the world.
So perhaps the problem isn’t whether fictional stories as a whole are good in themselves, but the types of stories we choose to tell, and whether they keep us trapped in our heads, or ground us in reality.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
My thinking has followed the author's in a few ways. When I was young I dreamed of being a writer, up through my early twenties. The reality of the global market for literature, though, makes it such a gamble, and requires you to be exceptionally obsessed with your fantasy worlds to compete with the other true word-cells. I do not think this is healthy.
Instead, the progression of my adult life has been away from the intellectual and towards the concrete. Towards locations, communities, physical activities. It's a big part of why I'm starting a small business, one that will hopefully provide a physical outlet and a real 'third space' that our modern world is sorely lacking.
What kind of business are you thinking of starting?
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Yeah, I think there is definitely a danger to escapism, but not all fantasy/sci-fi worlds have a negative effect, at least not on all people.
I've spent many hours with J.R.R. Tolkien's stuff, diving into relatively obscure writings by him, reading other people's theories... but it all tends to have a sort of uplifting, elevating, ennobling quality. I disagree with his moral worldview in which goodness is on a deep level more or less synonymous with obedience to the kind of God who is ok with drowning an entire continent because its people were corrupted by an evil being that He himself created in the first place. But that doesn't stop me from absorbing moral lessons and spiritual ennoblement from his work.
H.P. Lovecraft's writings are very different, and not what I would call ennobling, but from them I've received a lot of education in how to write in an interesting and grammatically advanced way, also in things like architecture and history. And there is something that I find very mystically interesting in his concept of "adventurous expectancy" that he touched on in some of his letters.
On a different note, there is Stephen King... I like his Americana, the noble blue collar workers and artists, the landscape of gas stations, diners, and small towns. It is also just good clean entertainment, there are many Stephen King fans but I've never heard of anyone becoming so obsessed with his work that it began to harm their lives.
Even something like Star Wars, which some people do get obsessed by, has a fun playful quality. It's basically an homage to many different kinds of other real and fictional worlds... tales of knightly chivalry, greaser movies, samurai movies, the Roman Empire, Nazi Germany, etc... but in space, and all put together into one fictional universe. I've spent some hours reading through Star Wars lore, but I've never been tempted to buy Star Wars merchandise or devote more than a small fraction of my life to Star Wars.
There is also reading about actual history, which I've done a lot of. It can have an escapist quality, but one can also learn valuable lessons from it. It would be difficult, I think, to have a reasonable notion of modern politics and geopolitics without having read history. There's something to be said for understanding today's reality from first principles and direct perception, and certainly that has a lot of value, but reading history is at the least a valuable aid, at least if one does not let it bias you too much (and of course one can also become biased while attempting to understand today's reality from first principles and direct perception). I've spent many an hour reading about obscure details of this or that World War 2 campaign, but I've never become tempted to devote more than a small fraction of my life to such activity.
I do think there is a real danger. I was maybe too bookish for my own good when I was a teenager. But I am not sure to what extent the distance that I kept from more direct involvement with reality was caused by my bookishness, and to what extent the bookishness was just what I did while I had that distance from more direct involvement with reality. It is possible that even if I had forced myself to put away the books, I would not have engaged more directly with reality any quicker than I actually did. It's hard to say.
What eventually drove me more out of the books was a combination of things... making friends and getting invited to do things, sexual frustration forcing me to learn how to develop social skills, becoming more rebellious in my attitude toward social structures like school, going away to college and living on my own, also just a deep sense of "there is more to life than just reading about life" and a deep dissatisfaction with a life spent merely on reading.
Some people get caught at some point on that journey and never actualize much further. But if it wasn't for the fantasy worlds, it's possible that they would not necessarily actualize much faster, or at all. I don't know. I just know that for me, the worlds of books have been a beneficial and, I think, not really particularly stunting part of my life. On the contrary, I think that they have probably enriched my life more than they have taken away.
Yeah I know what you mean, it's hard to say exactly what the root cause is, and how bad it is. I relate to this comment a lot, especially:
This was huge for me! I actually stumbled into /r/redpill in high school out of sexual frustration, and that changed my entire orientation. My anger at being rejected by the fairer sex led pretty directly to me putting down books for a while and really working to figure out how to succeed socially. Without that I easily could've become an incel.
To your point about people not actualizing further... I do think it depends on environment. We need culture to push especially young men to develop. Without that, I think escapism is far too attractive, and that's why we're seeing such a big rise of NEETs and such nowadays.
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As a note - I considered more directly addressing the history of writing, going deeper into the nature of society/civilization being predicated upon this sort of formalized abstractive process, but it got away from me a bit and wanted to keep it more personal/light.
If folks think that might be interesting, let me know. Or if you have reading suggestions on that front.
You might be interested in M John Harrison. A fantasy writer in his early career, he turned on the genre vehemently and spent much of his middle career attacking it, trying to cope with it, or pretending it wasn’t there. He wrote a famous internet essay on genre fantasy and its negative influences, but later wrote a second, less famous response to it, a decade or so later, saying that he was wrong. Fantasy was to blame, he still agreed, but it went far beyond just the genre. Everything in the modern world had become a fantasy, essentially, from cellphone commercials to presidential elections to the way that ordinary people lived. Fantasy and its deleterious influences had become all encompassing. He continues to grapple with the matter in books he writes today, in what is some of the most pertinent writing I have ever come across. I more or less agree with his present, complicated verdict, to the extent that I can understand him. Fantasy is bad, but in the modern world, everything is fantasy.
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