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.
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Notes -
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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