The Cost of Escaping Reality
Brian Holdsworth, 26 Aug 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DB9E_EUiC0
2:19 we're escaping our real lives in pursuit of something more exciting and more seductive
This kind of analysis has very long been popular with shrinks.
My atheist granny, who died in 1993 used to harrass ma and me over Christianity, discussions on theology, prayer, reading the Bible being "verklighetsflygt" = "escape from reality" ...
Before you make this kind of analysis, would you mind telling me, when a real part of someone's life means "an escape from his real life" ...?
Are Renaissance fairs evil because the participants escape the real life in XXth / XXIst CC.?
4:02 Antithesis to love is "narcissism"?
Is this a word from
Catholic moral theology?
I mean, I can't recall finding it either in the Prima Secundae or the Secunda Secundae ...
Can you at least trace it to St. Alfons Maria Liguori?
I can't claim having read him
as moral theologian, just The Glories of Mary.
4:24 I was tempted to go to St. Augustine ... when I recalled it could be Chesterton. Indeed.
“Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico; in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico; for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico; to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles… If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.”
Note, he did not say loving Pimlico for what it is, but loving Pimlico arbitrarily - and the very next phrase suggests loving Pimlico as Pimlico can be shown in a Sims game.
"The area has over 350 Grade II listed buildings and several Grade II* listed churches."
"In the mid-1930s Pimlico saw a second wave of development with the construction of Dolphin Square, a self-contained "city" of 1,250 up-market flats built on the site formerly occupied by Cubitt's building works. Completed in 1937, it quickly became popular with MPs and public servants. It was home to fascist Oswald Mosley until his arrest in 1940, and the headquarters of the Free French for much of the Second World War."
It seems that some people took Chesty's advice to love Pimlico. Perhaps Chesterton meant morally : "Pimlico is the setting of the 1940 version of
Gaslight."
4:40 And before that effort bears fruit, the love will very certainly be described by some as "escape from reality" ...
4:48 I think Chesterton actually did mean love in the sense of infatuation.
As to "intending the good of someone" ... it is possible that by "desperate" Chesterton meant the Peabody Estates of Pimlico:
"Through the late nineteenth century, Pimlico saw the construction of several Peabody Estates, charitable housing projects designed to provide affordable, quality homes."
It could very well have been those that made Chesterton say:
"Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Pimlico."
5:06 While the duty of parents is well described, you forget that some hormones of bonding are involved in making them in a sense infatuated with their children. Not sexually, but still, they are very far from being purely objective observers with no escape from reality.
Indeed, they arguably manage to raise their children better above their natural tendencies the more they are escaping from reality while doing so.
5:41 The majority of people who play with Sims are in fact teens or tweens who so far do NOT have parental responsibilities.
And the more one takes away from them the right to "escape reality" the less likely they are to succeed in acquiring such or similar responsibilities.
Noah had three sons around the age of 500 ... how come? Perhaps his earlier children had died, from not escaping the realities of sth like the Mahabharata war - or perhaps someone had consistently stamped him as "escaping from reality" so he didn't get a wife to when he was 500. From when his father begat him or his son his grandson, we can at least gather, it was not like puberty back then took 500 years to achieve.
5:58 "real relations"
Are you speaking of teens' and tweens' "real" relations to those
older than themselves?
Have you considered, with an aging society, older people willing to
give advice compete in greater and greater numbers for fewer people willing to
hear it?
In other words, the older generation are less and less a real support, and more and more a real competition about the relations that could have gone into for instance getting a wife or a husband ...
When those busibodies are being fled, it's a boon for them if they can pretend those fleeing them are in fact hurting themselves.
6:29 When it comes to the phone, I think it is distracting without offering what's normally referred to as "escape from reality" - I'm actually considered escapist by some for my refusal to get one.
7:36 Scrolling on your phone is not "virtual reality" ... your mistransferring what you did with what people playing Sims do ... not that I ever did.
- Andy Presby
- @andypresby6537
- I’m not sure he is. Stretching his point? Maybe. But people approach all forms of entertainment for diverse reasons. This applies to video games or scrolling social media or playing a board game; anything we do for fun. One reason we might’ve chosen to do it is to distract ourselves from something else.
The thing about Brian’s video though that bothers me is that he seems to treat escape as purely an evil to be avoided. He is, though not in a simplistic way, perhaps unintentionally adding a voice to the chorus that says “phone bad. Make phone go away and all will be good.” I think (as I’ve said in another comment) that there is a lot more nuance to it and it’s a nuanced conversation we desperately need to have. I’m very glad he made this video but I want him to talk more about it.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @hglundahl
- @andypresby6537 "he seems to treat escape as purely an evil to be avoided."
Indeed.
But even so, there is a very big difference between reading LWW in French (Edmund is getting back from the White Witch), a thing that clearly is "virtual" or "secondary" reality as opposed to primary reality, and scrolling the youtube feed and finding your comment, which as an interaction with me actually is part of primary reality and real business.
@andypresby6537 "One reason we might’ve chosen to do it is to distract ourselves from something else."
In my case, working on my internet production is a very welcome distraction from people who, denying that I do any work, pretend to look after how I am.
Distraction is not always the same as escape from reality, not that that per se is bad either.
9:25 I've never recommended anyone to walk around with ear phones ... may have sth to do with inadequate opportunities for healthier escapism ...
9:38 Being inattentive to the world around is a physiological need.
If it takes forms like walking with head phones it is because that need is not respected when they are sitting at home or in the bus or whatever. When you sit, you usually can avoid needing to quickly move - unless it's in enemy territory.
10:56 I begin to worry about your attitude to a Man who spent nights in prayer, removing Himself for hours on row from the world around Him. In case you are not aware, prayer usually does involve alpha state. Which certainly does lower your attention to the world around you.
11:35 "smartphones and social media"
I never access my social media on smartphones.
I don't even own one.
What your superstitious friend said about smartphones may well be worth saying, but he showed his superstition by adding social media to them. Why are you even friends with someone who's into the superstition of psychology?
Would you be friends with a pythic medium?
11:50 Being startled is not necessarily anxiogenic.
A man I admire far more than shrinks was once startled by discovering himself to be trying to open his door with a cork-screw - before putting it to its proper use. I think you cited him in a Pimlico / Rome connexion.
11:58 There is a kind of getting startled that actually
can be anxiogenic.
Getting startled by grown up people who absolutely exact your attention to them, because they "know" (from a man like your psychologist friend) that you need to attend to them. Not that they need your attention. You could arrange so they didn't. But their pov is that you need it, for instance in order to come back to the real world.
Here is the witness of someone who at the age of thirty (or past)
did escape from such people:
I Ruined My Life
Cinzia DuBois, 25 Aug 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g5HkfUrna0
12:08 "that's what sleep is for"
And prayer?
And reading?
And music?
And doing cross word puzzles and sudokus?
And comfort foods, including sweet coffee or tea and small amounts of alcohol?*
Or
just sleep?
If you push someone out of all moments of escapism
except sleep, you may end up not respecting sleep either. I've dealt with both types.
Or rather, not been able to deal with them. How does a homeless person compete with the fashionable shrinks in his neighbourhood for attention about how to treat him?
Especially if some don't want him to be charismatic when presenting his blogs?
* And Gregorian and Eastern rite liturgic music ...
12:27 Did you say we are created for this world?
If you said adapted, you might just be an Evolutionist Atheist ... I thought I heard created. A k a made ... let's check with the Penny Catechism ...
2. Why did God make you?
God made me to know him, love him and serve him in this world, and to be happy with him for ever in the next.
Knowing God, loving God, serving God, all three depend on
looking away from this world, in which His presence is not immediately known or visible to the senses.
There is a reason why my atheist granny called Christianity "escape from reality" ...
12:47 Oh, indeed.
But God has not refused either to be or to provide refuge ... what road would you rather take to holiness ...
- Calvin says you need to fairly and squarely face how evil and utterly unworthy you are
- Thérèse of Lisieux preferred to look away from herself and unto the Babe Jesus - and the Holy Face in Gethsemaneh.
Who of these do you think went justified when quitting the meditation for a chore?
Oh, wait, absorbed in real life chores leaves no room for meditation ... what was St. Thomas saying about why porc (meat) signifies impurity?
I think you can look up in Leviticus that the pig is not a ruminant ...
"The animal that chews the cud and has a divided hoof, is clean in signification. Because division of the hoof is a figure of the two Testaments: or of the Father and Son: or of the two natures in Christ: of the distinction of good and evil. While chewing the cud signifies meditation on the Scriptures and a sound understanding thereof; and whoever lacks either of these is spiritually unclean."
I think ruminants do escape from surrounding realities while ruminating ....
13:38 Taking up one's cross is one thing, but He also gave an example of praying, which is escapism.
Between Martha and Mary, who was escapist?
Who was holier?
