Do you want to run away? From places, people, and then, unenviably, whateverly, from yourself?
Read on, dove; like, duh.
Freedom had a great run. For millennia, it was into restoring hope and nurturing life. As goals go: hairy. And then freedom became about calling someone a fag. Letdown, it od’d on conservative idiocy and the proctologist contraption that is political correctness.
Escape became freedom’s reincarnation. For forever, escape was about inflicting pain on others to forget your own—you know, social media’s content strategy. Now, the meaning of escape has morphed into doing anything that doesn’t further your—prepare to vomit—life purpose.
Ergo, escape’s bad, and it’s for losers.
And that’s exactly why you must escape.
Escape isn’t about fantasy football, facebook, and ffing (yeah I have an uncommon F-word range) dislike. Escape is the opposite of all that. Escape is getting away from the fake pain you have used to validate the point of your life. Self-improvement, the causation-correlation orgy, has convinced you pain is pleasure, which is why you don’t feel neither. Anything other than shit wrapped in honey oat bread is an unhealthy breakfast—hustlers don’t eat sauce.
Freedom gave in because we fell in love with the cage. You get an echo chamber. You get an echo chamber. You get an echo chamber.
Escape is a reminder that you are in prison. But like freedom, we cared way too much about what we are escaping from instead of what we are escaping into.
The need to escape determined whether you lived. What it determines now is whether you are making the most of that life. Escape is how you find out what you love. Because I don’t know if you know this; I didn’t—doing things that make you happy is normal. It’s what finding what you love means.
Everything I love, I found through escape. I found writing because it was an escape from the inanity at work. I found reading because I wanted to escape the mediocrity of my writing. And when I wanted to escape them both, I traveled. Reading, writing, travel: The escape trifecta.
As opposed to what?
Work, marriage, and religion?
Because: funny thing: in my trifecta, I found three things I don’t want to escape; not run away from, but sit down with. Pain, still, but true, absolute. You know it because the happiness feels as real. It doesn’t scare you because you have no need to escape it.
Art is escaping loneliness to go into a deeper form of loneliness. Finding what you should do with your life is finding the loneliness(es) you don’t want to escape.
Meditations 