Nice post and exploration of this topic OP. I think what you said can be generalized to ‘Escapism and life denial comes about due to defeat, and you need to eat and drink deeply of the pleasures of life gained through victories in order to love and accept your role in the world again.’ Maybe that’s not much of a summary ; )
I particularly liked your examples of the martial arts. I was a smaller boy and a younger sibling, and the threat of being physically dominated by older siblings and these others tough me to hide myself and not commit earnestly to my passions. I never even played D&D as a kid, I lurked play by post forums. I joined a D&D group, and found a similar fear and withdraw from our passions in my comrades, one of whom needed an awful lot of weed, and dropped out his first semester, another who hesitantly played a catgirl but could never commit to it, and kept going through the motions of his conservative family.
I also took a judo class that semester, which didn’t cure my fear, but made me feel strong and not so afraid of others, which helped lead to taking other opportunities, which taught this love of what we actually can do in life which I feel is the fire inside all of our engines. The people in it were pretty boring, and the lifestyle of martial arts bores me, though that would probably be different had I excelled in it and found stimulation in competing rather than realizing I could beat those smaller than me but not larger than me without high investment.
The key is to love yourself and your ability to act, and the experience of life because there are things you can do to feel happy and unafraid. This is built on bringing beauty and actualization into your life. It shouldn’t be a grind of ‘improving yourself’ for some outside authority in my outside authority opinion ;) but it should rather be learning an instrument, that instrument being yourself. You play with what happens with different inputs, and fumble about without shame til you learn the pattern which makes something your find beautiful. That will mean giving up on patterns you can’t achieve, such as being a tough guy for most of us, as well as patterns of escapism which don’t deliver happy lives. Media can be a relaxing and inspiring pattern, indeed, someone who really loves manga and is making beautiful manga and is at peace has done well, even if they gave up on social dominance- not all of us can be dominant in every field. It’s just that most of the time of your life should be spent on things where you aren’t pining away for some unmet need.
I think what I’ve said here stands on its own and through personal experience, and I encourage others to adopt this mindset when they can. I will also point out that some of this causation is also reversed- people with shitty lives also just accept fantasy, and in some cases they can’t be helped, but there’s always some little thing we can do.
Nice post and exploration of this topic OP. I think what you said can be generalized to ‘Escapism and life denial comes about due to defeat, and you need to eat and drink deeply of the pleasures of life gained through victories in order to love and accept your role in the world again.’ Maybe that’s not much of a summary ; )
I particularly liked your examples of the martial arts. I was a smaller boy and a younger sibling, and the threat of being physically dominated by older siblings and these others tough me to hide myself and not commit earnestly to my passions. I never even played D&D as a kid, I lurked play by post forums. I joined a D&D group, and found a similar fear and withdraw from our passions in my comrades, one of whom needed an awful lot of weed, and dropped out his first semester, another who hesitantly played a catgirl but could never commit to it, and kept going through the motions of his conservative family.
I also took a judo class that semester, which didn’t cure my fear, but made me feel strong and not so afraid of others, which helped lead to taking other opportunities, which taught this love of what we actually can do in life which I feel is the fire inside all of our engines. The people in it were pretty boring, and the lifestyle of martial arts bores me, though that would probably be different had I excelled in it and found stimulation in competing rather than realizing I could beat those smaller than me but not larger than me without high investment.
The key is to love yourself and your ability to act, and the experience of life because there are things you can do to feel happy and unafraid. This is built on bringing beauty and actualization into your life. It shouldn’t be a grind of ‘improving yourself’ for some outside authority in my outside authority opinion ;) but it should rather be learning an instrument, that instrument being yourself. You play with what happens with different inputs, and fumble about without shame til you learn the pattern which makes something your find beautiful. That will mean giving up on patterns you can’t achieve, such as being a tough guy for most of us, as well as patterns of escapism which don’t deliver happy lives. Media can be a relaxing and inspiring pattern, indeed, someone who really loves manga and is making beautiful manga and is at peace has done well, even if they gave up on social dominance- not all of us can be dominant in every field. It’s just that most of the time of your life should be spent on things where you aren’t pining away for some unmet need.
I think what I’ve said here stands on its own and through personal experience, and I encourage others to adopt this mindset when they can. I will also point out that some of this causation is also reversed- people with shitty lives also just accept fantasy, and in some cases they can’t be helped, but there’s always some little thing we can do.