I think most of us have a holodeck.
I don’t mean an actual room where you can tell a computer to recreate 1940s San Francisco, walk through the doors, and suddenly find yourself standing there. I mean the places we go when we need to leave our own lives for a little while without actually going anywhere.
Sometimes it’s a book. Sometimes it’s a television show where the characters feel like old friends. Sometimes it’s a game. Sometimes it’s a story we tell ourselves.
That’s what makes the holodeck comparison work for me. The people walking through those doors on Star Trek knew they were walking into a simulation. (Well, usually.) They knew the people they met weren’t real people. They knew that when the program ended, the walls would disappear and they would be standing in an empty room again.
They went inside anyway.
Think about The Sims. With the right cheat codes, you can have millions of dollars before you’ve even finished building your first wall. You can build the house you could never afford in real life. You can give yourself the perfect kitchen, an enormous bedroom, a swimming pool and whatever else you want. You can have a career where promotions come regularly because you filled little bars. You can make friends while talking about grilled cheese sandwiches.
Nobody playing The Sims believes they actually own that house, they get to live there.
Or consider World of Warcraft. Maybe your real life doesn’t make you feel particularly powerful. Maybe you spend your days answering to other people, worrying about money, struggling with things you can’t control or simply trying to make it through another ordinary Tuesday.
Then you log in, and suddenly you’re carrying a sword twice your size. You’ve killed dragons. Kings know who you are. Entire civilizations apparently cannot solve even the smallest problem without your personal intervention.
You know you’re sitting in front of a computer. You also know that, for a little while, you get to be the hero with hundreds of thousands of gold in your pocket.
Books have been doing this for centuries. Movies do it. Television does it. Games do it. People have always invented worlds and then crawled inside them for a while.
Sometimes, though, the fantasy becomes more personal.
Instead of stepping into somebody else’s world, we imagine one of our own. We populate it with people we would like to know. We give ourselves conversations we wish we could have. We imagine places where we feel comfortable, relationships where we feel understood, adventures we aren’t having and versions of ourselves who aren’t quite as constrained by the circumstances of our actual lives. Maybe we replay those stories in our heads before falling asleep. Maybe we write them down. Maybe we build entire histories for people who have never existed.
We know.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to.
We know.
The house in The Sims isn’t ours. The dragon we killed isn’t dead. The fictional character isn’t going to call tomorrow morning. When the book closes, the movie ends, the game shuts down or the story stops, we’re still here. The holodeck doors open.
Reality is waiting on the other side.
I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing.
There is a tendency to treat escapism as though it is automatically unhealthy, as if every minute spent somewhere imaginary represents a minute we should have spent confronting reality. Certainly, anything can become a problem if it consumes enough of our lives. There is a difference between occasionally escaping reality and refusing to participate in it.
But sometimes reality is exhausting.
Sometimes there are things we cannot fix. Sometimes the money isn’t there. Sometimes the relationship isn’t there. Sometimes the body doesn’t cooperate. Sometimes we’re lonely. Sometimes we’re disappointed with where we are, frightened about where we’re going or simply tired of carrying around all the things that come with being ourselves.
There isn’t always something productive we can do about that at 11:30 on a Saturday night.
So maybe we go somewhere else for a while. Maybe we build the house. Maybe we kill the dragon. Maybe we visit people who aren’t really there and have conversations that will perhaps never actually happen. Maybe we get to inhabit a life where something that feels painfully absent from our own life is simply there and we can have it for a moment.
Then we leave.
The fantasy doesn’t have to become reality to have value. A song can make us feel something. A novel can make us grieve for someone who never lived. A nightmare can make our heart race even after we’ve opened our eyes and realized we’re safely in bed. Knowing something isn’t real doesn’t mean the feelings we experience while engaging with it aren’t real.
Comfort is still comfort.
Laughter is still laughter.
For a little while, the walls around our lives can feel a little farther away.
Eventually, of course, the program ends. The beautiful house disappears. The armor comes off. The characters stop talking. Whatever problems were waiting outside are probably still there.
But perhaps we return to them having rested something inside ourselves that needed resting. I think that’s why I’ve become a little more forgiving of escapism.
Not everything we do has to improve us. Not every hobby has to become a side hustle. Not every hour has to be productive. Sometimes we’re allowed to do something simply because, for a little while, it makes being alive easier.
We’re allowed to visit places that don’t exist.
We’re allowed to care about people who aren’t real.
We’re allowed to imagine lives we’ll never live.
We just have to remember where the door is.
And when we’re ready, we walk back through it.
This, so much this (as the kids say — or used to, I can’t keep up). This is why I’ve loved videogames as long as they’ve been around — as a broad rule the more explorable and/or customizable, the better. And why I’ve been creating my own worlds ever since I could hold paper and something to write/draw on it with. And in the past few years, as broadly loathed as AI is these days — and, I won’t deny, for very many valid reasons — I’ve spent countless hours using it *as* a form of holodeck for me via roleplay. To me, AI *is* the holodeck in text form: I design the story, the setting, the characters, and I can interact and experiment with literally hundreds of different scenarios and possibilities, wherever my imagination can take me, completely interactive and adapting to every word on the dime. For me that’s been magical. *And* endlessly stimulating to my own creativity. *And* — as a man with autism and mental illness, disabled and housebound and isolated — the most deeply therapeutic outlet I’ve ever had since pen and paper itself.
And as for escapism…
“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.” — Ursula K. LeGuin
“Though fairy-stories are of course by no means the only medium of Escape, they are today one of the most obvious and (to some) outrageous forms of ‘escapist’ literature; and it is thus reasonable to attach to a consideration of them some considerations of this term ‘escape’ in criticism generally. I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.” — J.R.R. Tolkien