So far at least, my favorite hit song of 2023, among the songs that have clinched a spot on the Year-End charts (to be released in early December), is the song Escapism, by Raye featuring 070 Shake. Among the more powerful lines of this deeply unusual song is are the following: “You can run / But you’ll never escape / Sunset in the maze,” which are part of 070 Shake’s nightmare fuel bridge to a song that deals heavily with the desire to escape the crushing pain and anguish that results from a break-up, involving heavy self-medication and risky behavior that leads the singer into a deeply troubling and dangerous situation. Without wishing to comment on the specific nature of the song itself and the dangerous aspects of self-medication as well as the contemporary desire to avoid pain altogether, I would like to comment at some length about the subject of escape and escapism.

When the subject of escapism in art and literature comes up, there is often an apologetic air to the discussion that implies that this sort of art is simply a matter of taste and personal preference and that such literature is not serious enough to be taken seriously. I do not wish to adopt this view. Escape is not a lighthearted matter. When we think about issues of escape, it includes a wide variety of aspects. One of them, as noted earlier, is the enjoyment of art and literature that seeks to take us from the misery of our present conditions and put us in a time, place, and situation that allow us to find enjoyment and excitement and pleasure, which may be rare in our personal lives. Escapism is also involved in such disparate matters as the search for religious freedom from immoral practices, the desire to homeschool children because of corrupt and decadent educational practices, the preference for free and fair elections over managed democracy or totalitarian dictatorships, or the desire to be free to emigrate to escape intolerable situations in one’s home country or area, or a variety of other related matters based on the longing to escape a situation that is seen as intolerable. Talking about any of these subjects could be expanded to book-length, but what I wish to do is comment about the common element of escape that underlies all of them.

One of the more melancholy aspects of contemporary existence is the fact that so much of our lives, even for those of us that think of ourselves as free, is lived in a prison-like existence. Some people comment on the school-prison pipeline, where those who are unable to restrain themselves in the restrictive school environment find themselves in such trouble that their freedom is even more heavily restrained in becoming career criminals. Others have commented on the immense lack of freedom that is involved in the way that many people work and live under high degrees of surveillance. In such an environment, it is little wonder that people wish to escape the misery of such an existence by any means possible, when it seems as if the outside world and the oppressive people who seek to govern it desire to imprison the people under their rule as much as possible. When even entertainment becomes filled with the misery of contemporary political theories that bring such misery to real life, and when it seems as if everything that allowed people to opt out of the evils of life or to have a fresh start is being slowly whittled away to nonexistence, the desire for escape becomes all the more intense as well as all the more difficult to attain. Even the freedom of imagination becomes threatened when authorities wish to enslave others completely, while remaining entirely free from the burdens and horrors they inflict so ruthlessly on others.

Our desire to escape, although there is a strong moral basis in favor of it, is problematic nonetheless. Among the more problematic aspects of our desire to escape is that there are two sorts of realities that we may wish to escape from. Some of these realities result from the evils that are inflicted upon us by others, and some of them are the natural consequences of our own faults and mistakes. To the extent that our suffering comes from outside of us, our desire for escape is morally worthwhile, and allows us to live better lives free from the misery that we have in living under the tyrannical rule of evildoers. Such an escape is a blessing not only on a personal level, but also on a moral level, and it is righteous and not merely pleasant to seek such freedom. Unfortunately, not all that we wish to escape from comes from outside of us, and when we are seeking to escape the natural consequences of our own folly and error, what we find is that these consequences follow us as long as we continue in folly and error. It is only repentance and growth that lead us to escape the consequences of wrongdoing, when we no longer do what is wrong and instead do what is right. Sometimes, unfortunately, the natural consequences of our wrongdoing may feel like the tyrannical behavior of others when it is in fact the operation of justice (if not always mercy), and such problems will be impossible to escape so long as we remain evildoers ourselves.

What should our response be to this? We are not always in the position of seeking to escape ourselves, but at the same time there are unpleasant aspects of reality for all of us that we would wish to escape. Sometimes, despite our best efforts and intentions, we find ourselves unable to deliver ourselves from the difficulties that we face. The forces within us and outside of us in combination against our well-being and happiness are sometimes too strong for us to overcome without help from another place. Knowing ourselves and our own situations, and our own natures, we therefore ought to be compassionate on other people. Part of the operation of this compassion is seeking to help people avoid feeling trapped in whatever intolerable aspects of reality exist in their lives. Sometimes helping people to escape means providing them with the insight and education that they need to avoid making the same tragic mistakes in their lives that bring inevitable suffering and misery. Sometimes it means providing a fresh start to someone who has turned their life around but still has the repercussions from past mistakes dragging them down like a millstone around the neck. And sometimes it means providing a place of refuge where someone can escape from tyrants and abusers who seek to dominate and destroy them and ruin the joy and worth of their lives. It is by no means an easy or straightforward task to escape from what drags us down in this life, nor to help others to do so in their own lives, but it is a worthwhile undertaking all the same.