Reading & Entertainment

Reading and Entertainment:

Is there such a thing as too much escapism?

Hello Everyone, 

This post is something that I have been thinking about for the past little while, but in light of recent personal life events I need to share my opinions. Yesterday, January 3rd 2018 my grandfather passed away. My immediate reaction to this news was to cry, then I began to look for escapes from the thoughts and sorrow. My escapes are usually books and movies; however, when I reached for my typical mechanisms to escape they felt like disgusting and crude versions of reality. Is this emotion from the recent events, or from the fact that we are too concerned in the Western World with finding more and better content? 

My initial reaction was that it must be a reaction to the current events, though the more I have tried to escape today I just find it repulsive. This is something that I know will pass, but it has given me the time to think about how we as society consume media and attempt to deal with emotions. Escaping into a well written fantasy world is joyous on most days for me, when looking at it now I am struck by the following questions that I cannot necessarily answer: 

• Am I reading to find enjoyment, or to remove emotional and thought provoking discussions from my mind? 
• In this case I believe I was trying to escape thoughts. But when I am not under such emotions I think that it may be the exact opposite. I read to fill my mind with new thoughts and discussions regarding important information of the times. 
• Is there such a thing as too much escapism? 
• Yes, when we consistently use media of any kind to avoid dealing with pertinent issues I believe that is a bad thing. I have not had enough experience with extreme emotion in my life to truly gauge whether I read during all times of high emotion. This is something that I would like to monitor in the future to ensure a healthy balance. 
• How can I change this in the future? 
• This is something that requires a unique balance between enjoyment and NEEDING enjoyment from reading. I would like to read many books each year, most of which I will never get to in that given year; this is not a sustainable way to read and enjoy the world. I am working this year through many books though I will work to find a balance to find human interaction and experiential balance in my life. In order to do this my reading life may slip up. Allowing my already slow reading pace to slow up even more is not something that I am not willing to compromise, so the real question is how to find a balance? 

The whole idea for this post was given to me through my attempt to escape my grandfather's death, though then I was contemplating Western Society's need for more and better entertainment. I do not know if I will ever understand the way we have begun to highly value entertainment of all kinds in society. I only know that there is a great need for balance between the real and fictitious/escapist; how to find that balance is something that needs to be investigated further. 

None of these thoughts should be construed as me falling out of love with reading or blogging and the community surrounding it. It only should act as a springboard for further thought by you all, do we read or experience too much of life through entertainment? I think that we may in fact live vicariously through entertainment far too much than is healthy. I will continue reading as vigorously as I always have, though I will work harder to ensure it is not as a repressive or complete escape from current events. The overall thought I am trying to make sense of through this post is that there is joy in moderation, not gluttony.

This is a post that I needed to write to explore my thoughts, I hope it makes sense. I promise Sunday will be a more directly book related post with less philosophical thoughts. 

Happy Reading!