A long time ago I had this crazy idea that pretty much everything was culturally relevant. From religious rituals going back thousands of years to the most recent trends on tiktok, all of them are expressions of a society trying to figure out the future, and what it means to be human. I even have a fairly highbrow post about it here.

My favorite bits of our culture happen to be speculative fiction (SF). I love it all, from hard science fiction to the softest of fantasy. I even read the occasional romance for the sake of variety. All of it to me is good clean fun. I love nothing more than cracking open a good book (either paper or electronic, I’m non-denominational about format) and losing myself in another world. If you’re into audible books, or tv series, or movies, instead of novels, I think those are just as valid in terms of escaping. It’s all falling into a story.

And that’s the point, right? To escape to another world. It doesn’t matter if that world is in the exact same city you live but with werewolves; or a forested glen from a mythical past; or a strange and beguiling alien civilization on the other side of the galaxy. They all exist as places for us to escape to.

It doesn’t help that one of the more popular ways to put down “genre fiction” is to call it escapism. Far from being insulted, I think consumers of SF like myself should consider this a compliment. Yes we are escaping. Sure there are other benefits as well, like learning to be more empathetic, or understanding what a more technologically advanced society might look like, but at the end of the day it is still an escape. When you have depression like I do, then escape is not only entertaining, it is also a requirement for continued mental health.

Take two novels and call me in the morning.

So why? Why then do we need to escape? What are we running from?

There’s a part of me that would love to say we are escaping from the merciless and grinding wheels of capitalism. After all, once you reach a certain age in this world you are expected to find a way to make money, and then keep making money, until you either grow a large enough pile that you can stop, or you get crushed under its gears. It is a hamster wheel of death, and there are no other options. I don’t care who you are, that’s pretty damn daunting. Spend some time around the homeless and you’ll see what its like to be voted off the economic island. Certainly, this is terrifying enough that anyone reasonably sane would want to take an occasional vacation from that constant pressure.  

But then I realized that escapist stories have existed long before the first grinding gears of factories were ever built; before that Karl guy wrote his book on Capital; and even before the existence of capital as an economic engine. Stories pre-date all of these. Keep in mind that the biggest escape story of all time is well over 2500 years old, and was so wildly successful that we still refer to any long escape story as an odyssey, named after its protagonist. Clearly, this cannot be the only ancient escapism story. At one point there had to be millions of stories like the Odyssey. Most of them did not make the long race—first to paper, and then through many translations until they exist in our present day—but you know they had to be there. Humans being what we are, we get bored easily. Somebody’s aunt or uncle had to say something to the children of our long distant forebears to keep them from squirming around the fire. We know these stories existed and someone told them, because people tell stories. It’s what humans do. 

So if I can’t blame capitalism for our collective need to escape, what can I blame? Is it our human condition? Is just the process of existing so daunting that we need to put it aside every once in a while?

What makes us want to step out of ourselves?

It’s not escapism, it’s a dictionary

First I want to go back to an important point, perhaps the most important: Humans are a social species. We didn’t just evolve from apes, we evolved together as a group. Humans are never alone. We come in clumps, and those clumps of people are so important that we have names for how they are connected to each other: Husband, Father, Aunt, Cousin, Sister, Daughter, etc.

One of the key aspects of humans is that if they are isolated enough from the company of others they are considered damaged. In fact, one of the main punishments humans have adopted over the years is to socially shun those who do not obey the rules. Disconnection in this context is destruction.

So we are not only a social species, but we have to remain together with others of our kind in order to remain healthy and/or sane.

But that is not an easy task. We are all so different, with different ideas, and different needs, and different ways of looking at the world. Anyone who has tried to arrange a date with three or more busy adults for something like a D&D campaign, or even for something as short as seeing a movie, can tell you how hard it can be just to get four adults in the same space at the same time. And that is just to be entertained. Imagine if you had to gather together daily so you could eat.

Humans need a way to have their thoughts and ideas be close enough to each other that they can work together. We need a common set of thoughts or viewpoints so that when someone says bird, we all have a pretty good idea what “bird” means. That way, we can all agree on things that are important. 

You might say, “Isn’t that the point of language, to give us common definitions?” 

It’s at this point that I would laugh and then ask, “Have you never been involved in an argument on the web before?” Five minutes of exposure to the internet should make it obvious that humans are very talented at misunderstanding even clearly defined words. It’s one of our special skills. 

Besides, communication existed long before language. There are other channels of communication that we still use, and which have nothing to do with the encoding of words into sound bites. We make noises, we use facial expression and body posture, we change our hair or our clothing, we even communicate with each other by how we walk. 

All that to say that while language is indeed important for communication, we also require other kinds of nonverbal signals to make sure what we’re communicating is understood. 

And even with all that, there is no guarantee that when I say the word “cat” that you understand it to mean a four-legged mammal with pointy ears and a tail. Humans not only need common definitions for words, but we need a common context for them so the words convey the proper meaning.

If the word “cat” to you means a domestic house cat, but “cat” to me means a wild mountain lion, then we’re going to have a strange conversation when you try to explain to me how to give a cat a pill. 

And this is the one of the primary purposes of culture, to give the proper context to each word or idea. We use not only words, but stories so we both understand which kind of “cat” you place on your lap, and which kind of “cat” you don’t let into your home. 

Obviously culture is concerned with other things besides cats. Mostly it’s about how to properly behave with others, so we can remain cohesive and work together. It gives us a sense of social hierarchy so we know who we need to be extra nice to, and who we can sometimes ignore. Culture also does a pretty good job of defining those people who are close enough to be considered part of “our” tribe, and those people who are far enough from us that we can safely ignore or even harm.

Culture fills all of those roles and more. And the primary way it does this is via story. Story is the medium by which the message of culture is conveyed. If culture were the internet, then story would be the router you use to connect to it. 

But making culture sound like a dictionary sort of misses the point. Yes, it works to define important stuff, but that isn’t why we escape into it. Perhaps rather than referring to culture as a dictionary, we should think of it as a candy bar. 

See, the way that stories work, the reason why culture is a thing we evolved with (and continue to evolve with) is because of a hack in our wiring. When one person expresses an emotion or feeling, then the humans around them will mimic that same emotion or feeling. Those facial expressions we constantly make towards each other not only convey what we are feeling (like some weird kind of semaphore), but by watching them our bodies will produce those same emotions in ourselves. 

If you tell a friend a sad story and they reply that they, “feel your heartache,” they are not just being metaphorical. They are in fact feeling your emotions. It’s not just verbal stories either. We’ve all had the experience of listening to a song and suddenly feeling its emotion. There are songs of heartbreak, songs of joy, songs of love, even songs of angst. The singer sings a few words, and it feels like the words are echoing in our souls. That is the power of emotional mimicry.

If you think about it, this is a pretty cool hack. It’s one thing to tell you I am sad, but it’s a whole other thing if I can get you to feel my sadness. Then you’ll have a much deeper understanding of my experience. And when two or more people have to be around each other for any length of time, being able to understand each other’s experience makes it a lot easier to live with them.

Curiously, this hack of emotional mimicry can be turned off. If a person emotes to us from an outside group we will either limit our emotional response, or suppress it altogether so we don’t have one at all. Among other things, this means that in a heightened state of political alignment we do not feel as much the other side’s experiences. We are less essentially emotionally connected, which means we cannot communicate as well.

The thing is, we like those emotional connections, or perhaps I should say we evolved to like them. Regardless of how we got here, such emotional connections are like candy to us. Even the bitter ones are tasty and sweet. 

So now we know stories are a way to define the human experience, and are good at expressing emotions, but what does that have to do with escapism?

Stories are a way to string together our common emotions and wrap them around a chunk of data so we will remember it. Because we mimic the emotions projected at us, we will then feel whatever emotion the story is trying to convey. In short, stories are a lesson wrapped with an emotional punch, a bit like having your vitamins stuffed inside a tasty chocolate coating.

For example, say you want to train your citizens so they will stand for their country if it is invaded. This is a tricky lesson to learn. Most humans, when facing soldiers with weapons in their neighborhood, would (wisely) run in the opposite direction. So how do you get the people to stay? 

The first thing you do is to tell a story that would mimic the emotional experience of staying to protect their neighborhood. The trick is, you need to give the “hero” of that story something respectable to do. So you make up a story about a boy who stays behind to protect his people. You use a boy because he is small and innocent. Someone easily over-looked. Every human can relate to that feeling. The thing you don’t do is make your story about invading armies, because that would be too scary for a boy to face, so you pick a problem that is more his size: Water. Not only water, but water with a boy-sized solution. A small hole in a dike. 

Now that we have our story, we need to attach all the emotional parts to it to make it memorable. We also need to give it a resolution, so the listener knows what kind of reward they will receive if they mimic the boy’s behavior. Thus the story becomes:

There was a boy who saw a small hole in a dike. The hole was in a remote area, far from anyone around. The boy knew that by the time he ran home and warned everyone, the hole would expand and the dike would fail, flooding everyone. So instead he ran to the dike and put his finger in the hole. He remained steadfast for hours, alone and getting cold, but keeping his unsuspecting neighbors safe. Eventually someone saw him and warned the village. The dike was repaired and everyone was saved. 

Emotionally, this story is about someone very small and easily overlooked, seeing a coming disaster and acting quickly. They are all alone, afraid, and face terrible hardship, but because they remain steadfast they eventually become a hero. 

If you think about it, this is exactly the emotional experience of someone who stays behind to fight off an invading army. By making the boy a hero it gives the listener a reason to remain steadfast when they are feeling afraid and alone. They know that they are heroes, even if no one is around to acknowledge their heroism, because they faced danger and did not run.

The fact that this story is implausible (you cannot plug a hole in a dike with a finger), and the original version of this story (the Little Dutch Boy) came from a novel in America, does not really matter. The story was popular anyway, though it was invented for entirely different reasons than fending off a looming military invasion. The emotional experience that the story expressed was considered valuable in many English speaking nations. So powerful is this story that the Dutch government set up a statue to the  Little Dutch Boy, even though such a boy never existed. 

So that is a reason why cultures might use a story, but it still doesn’t explain the escapism part.

Yeah okay. Fair enough. I wanted to give you an idea of the power of stories and why they might be culturally useful. But that is not the same as personally useful. Why do we consume stories? Again, what are we escaping from?

As we discussed above, when we read a story we will have the exact same emotional experience as the hero of that story. Plus we get to learn any cultural lessons that come wrapped up in those tasty emotions. It’s a bit like taking a mini college course on the topic, only one that ends with a tasty dessert.

Usually, the educational aspects of escapism are viewed as secondary to the emotional voyeurism we get from the story*. That is, we forget stories are learning tools, and think of them more as just another tasty treat, or perhaps an intellectual dopamine hit. And that’s fine because we all understand that being a human is hard. Being a successful human is even harder. The difficulties we face in our lives don’t come from the work that we do, as most of it is not particularly difficult. The difficulties we face come from the fact that we have to do our work with other humans. 

Consider the average teen. They are placed into a school where they are expected to learn with others, but easily more than half of the things they will learn have nothing to do with what is taught in the classroom. What class teaches them how to apologize to a friend, or how to know when they “like” someone, or when to intervene when they see a friend is struggling, or how to make a stranger in their homeroom feel welcome, or how to say no when their peer group wants to drink or do drugs? 

If this same teen does well in school it usually means they are expected to run the same gauntlet but at the collegiate level. Much of the same issues they had from high school will apply, only now they will be run in adult mode, which means things like sex and drinking are not only allowed, but expected. 

Regardless of whether they do college or not, most teens eventually find themselves in the job market. Now they have tasks to do, but with coworkers and bosses, some of which can make their lives better, and some of which can crush their efforts before they even start their profession. Often it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. On top of that, they have to learn how to live alone, or with others who aren’t family, manage their income so they don’t run out of money, date and enter relationships, cook and learn to shop for groceries, clean themselves and everything in their home, and somehow create a balanced life.

All of these situations are social ones, and every single one of them will leave a MASSIVE impact on their future. The social connections they make will be far more important than any job on the CV. As I often say, choosing to marry – choosing WHO to marry – is the single largest financial decision you will ever make in your life. And the friends you make (and keep) will likely be even more impactful.

So where do you go to learn how to manage all that? What class is going to teach you Humanity 101?

As I said way back near the beginning, the single most important part of being humans is that we are a social species. Every single thing we do of importance involves working with others. Human relationships are the glue that keeps the whole ball of wax moving.

And yet there are no classes for how to manage and learn about human relationships. We’re talking about the single most impactful thing in your life, and yet there is no formal way to learn how to do it well.

So what can you do? Is there a short cut? How does one learn to human better?

The way most of us do this is by a process that engineers call T & E, or trial and error. That is we bump into each other, crash about, make a lot of mistakes, and when the smoke clears we try to make sense of it all.  Mind you, this works, after a fashion, but it’s not ever directed. It helps that we are all mostly amateurs, and there are a lot of social cues (aka culture) to keep us from making the most egregious mistakes, but the process is prone to error, and some of those errors are fatal. 

So if this is the case, how can we improve our game? Where are the cheat codes to be better at human relationships?

And now we come back to that thing I was saying that stories are an educational experience wrapped up in an emotionally tasty package. This is not an accident. Stories are the primary way we learn how to be human, and how to manage relationships. They are chocked full of all kinds of clues about how to human better. They are a deep and vastly informal instructional manual. That friend of yours that is reading a novel; that co-worker who in binging a show; the guy you met on the bus that is listening to books on the way to his office; all of them are riding an emotional rollercoaster, getting all the thrills and chills that anyone could ask for, yet they are also learning how to have better human relationships. 

How do I know this? Because at the heart of every story is a human relationship. Stories are always about humans interacting with other humans. It doesn’t matter media it is, be it a novel, the theater, a painting, a tv show, or a movie; it doesn’t matter what the genre it says on the outside of the tin, from Romance to Science Fiction, Fantasy to Literature; at their core they’re all Human Relationships 101. 

And that is why we escape. We are all busy learning how to be better humans, and along the way are being vastly entertained. 

Before I leave, there is one caveat I should explain. The educational aspects of stories, while important, are not always curated. You should not plow in with the assumption that the lesson buried within the story is one worthy of learning. In fact, some stories have lessons so poor that they work as an anti-lesson, a good instruction on what NOT to do. As a consumer of culture, you are expected to both learn, and also manage your experience. One of the nicer aspects of popularity in our culture is that it tends to elevate those stories that also teach healthy relationships. This is not always true, for we humans do love our revenge, even though it often is destructive. As the saying goes, resentment is like drinking poison thinking it will harm your enemies. All that to say, make sure the lesson being taught is one you want to learn. Or as they say in societies that run the capitalism add on: Caveat emptor.

*That is unless the story crosses into the ground that’s been set aside for a culture war, then this relationship will invert: The inherent lesson will become primary, and the emotional parts of the story are viewed as secondary. One person’s escape story is another person’s propaganda. As of this writing, stories about trans of gay people are often flipped this way. There’s not a lot of rhyme or reason for this, it’s just different aspects of our larger culture battling for a common space.