Escapism: The Domination of Demons

How many times do we face reality? How many times do we run from it?

We think we have become cruel, there is a part of us, either because of our past or because of our surroundings, that often makes us feel as if we’ve become someone different. As if the person who meets our eyes in the mirror is not truly us, is not truly anyone but a flicker of the air, a passing, a nothingness, a void. We look around and we feel empty because there is nothing to fulfil us. Nothing to do. This is escapism at its core, the urge to run from reality due its heavy burden of finding a purpose.

We think our habits are a carefully crafted plan to support our lives but the truth is even our perfectly fixed routines are just another form of escaping the depth of reality and of avoiding the main questions that we are required to consider to truly feel the essence of life. Society, in this way, is the biggest contributor to the blind escapism in our lives that has become the foundation of surviving in this world. We are kept in a cage through schools, left in our freedom through colleges; ‘supposedly’ open to decide which life we desire, open to pursue the life we wish to create, but all this freedom, when built on a temporary relief from society, leads to nothing. Our parents, our elders, they are all a member of this chain of escapism; of society taking away our own individuality by creating a system so easy and so powerful that it can make even the most creative mind conform. A system built on the common requirements and material desires of humanity, society, through this system of escapism and routine, makes people clueless about their own individual potential.

Even religious beliefs, blind faith in the Gods, is another form of escapism we depend on to help escape the truth that our fate lies entirely in our hands, and that every action of ours determines how our life will go. Each decision we take has a grave effect on our lives, we want to believe that our sins can be washed away and so we blindly pray to God, not realising that our bad deeds cannot be forgiven by God, but rather through our own mind; by uncovering the destruction of our sins, punishing ourselves for our wrongdoings (to feel morally right) and by doing good deeds that bring us enough peace to feel good about ourselves again. We pray to God for miracles to escape tragedies, we act like fools and then pray for forgiveness and understanding. Our blind faith in our Gods takes us away from the harshest truth: that everything we do is a result of our own actions, and all things out of our control are not influenced by our prayers to God but are rather, simply out of our control. We must learn to face this dark truth, no matter how deep this faith for God goes and no matter how much strength the belief in our mythology gives us.

This confrontation with reality is important because escapism creates a domination of demons within our mind. Crafting a person who is unlike our true selves, society’s foot on our lives makes it too difficult for us to have the time or the patience to consider what we truly feel inside, what we wish to gain from our lives, what we’re most passionate about and who we wish to be as a person. Such questions are answered so plainly by society that every mind seems to conform, even when they believe that they’re doing something different, we are being consumed by society’s desires. Its desperate hold on our lives and our minds take away our own desires from us and leave us with a being we can’t recognise in the mirror, a being we feel nothing for. This is a being who has no morals of their own and depends solely on a collective opinion. Although some people thrive in this submission to a certain extent, there are others who completely lose themselves in it, leading to a peak of destruction that leaves them too far off to be fixed. This is why it’s important to understand the depth of reality and the effect of our interpretation of it. It’s important to find love in this reality that constantly makes us wanna escape. We have to dig into the root of our escapism, the root of why we feel the need to constantly to avoid or cheat reality.

These demons are a reminder; what we are doing is not right, it is not what we want. The demons are a warning; if we continue this escapism, we will only welcome our destruction and lose who we are in the process. Most importantly, the demons are a question; left alone in the world, what would we want to be? What are we the most passionate about? What kind of a life do we wish to create beyond all the material requirements of life that burden us into conforming? The demons are scary, they pose a question that has no easy answer, but the demons are also desperate, and unless and until they have been fed an answer, they will only grow, becoming the centre of our spirits.