How to Beat Escapism and Stop Running Away From Life With 7 Powerful, Actionable Strategies

It’s nice to have a break every now and then from the realities of life.

That may mean taking a vacation to a faraway place, getting out to a park, or even simple daydreaming.

But there’s a difference between intentional escapism and outright avoidance, which is what this article’s going to take a look at.

You’ll also learn:

• Why the modern world makes it an easy place to escape reality
• Why avoidance and escapism happens, especially to young people
• Why it’s so hard to tune into reality and lean into escapism instead
• The real danger of escapism
• How to escape escapism (lol)

Let’s run into running away. 

The Modern World: Setting the Ground for Escapism

The modern world holds more potential for the individual than any other period in history.

It also holds more pitfalls, diversions, escapist behaviors, and self-destructive traps than we know what to do with. The individual can become ensnared in these temptations, ultimately limiting his effectiveness, his productivity, and his freedom–all because he tried to escape reality.

Common Forms of Escapism and Avoidance (Escapist Behaviors)

Escapism takes the form of one of these things, though not always:

• Sex
• Drugs
• Travel
• Partying
• Shopping
• Entertainment
• Mindless Internet browsing
• Endless texting back and forth
• The list goes on and on and on and on and…

Anything really that makes you escape and forget reality, shoving “need-to-dos” to some imaginary future realm where they will suddenly take care of itself – is escapism.

Most people will find themselves ensnared by at least one of these at one point in their lives if they’re not careful (especially if they’re in a lot of mental or physical pain).

These are all enabled by what I call the “convention of postmodernism”.

The Convention of Postmodernism

A lot of the societal structures that instituted some code of conduct have eroded or are eroding in today’s world.

Many moons ago, your word was your bond. Now, you need a paper document backed up by a team of litigation-happy lawyers just to enforce a contract.

The center of society was considered the family unit, but most people do not live in or originate from constructive families.

Religion and belief in a deity beyond oneself is considered a bygone artifact from a primitive era.

The result of all of this is a non-universal standard of behavior that pretty much states:

“there are no rules, let’s just have fun and do whatever the fuck we want to do.”

It’s an environment like this that escapism, running away from life, and pushing things off to the future can flourish de-facto because they give the individual full liberty to say:

“that’s just my style, man. If I want to do these things, if I want to get wasted, if I want to be a degenerate, I should be able to do that”.

This creates a world where someone feels they have extreme liberty to retreat from their problems. Instead of running to a therapist’s office, they run to the pill cabinet and take as many as possible until they pass out (or die).

The Consequence(s) of Running Away From Life

“Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause; everything happens according to Law; Chance is but a name for Law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the Law.” — The Kybalion

The real consequence of all this escapism is that it makes you less effective in the real world.

Here’s some things escapism does:

First:

Engaging in escapist behaviors can provide a momentary sense of relief, but ultimately leads to increased stress and unresolved problems.

People often escape their responsibilities, fears, and emotional pain instead of confronting them, which puts them deeper in the hole they were so desperately trying to escape from.

Second:

Secondly, compulsive escapism can act as a Band-Aid fix, covering up issues without providing solutions.

Third:

Ignoring mental health issues through escapism means those issues are left unresolved. This can create a lot of psychological trauma.

Fourth:

Escapism is basically procrastination, as it delays confronting painful issues.

Fifth:

People often turn to escapism when they lack emotional intelligence to deal with trauma or stress.

Men and people in general often lack this sense of groundedness that allows them to deal with life effectively.

Sixth:

When escapism becomes a coping mechanism, it can lead to addiction or compulsive behaviors, as I alluded to earlier.

In the final analysis…

We only grow through challenges. There’s only two outcomes to a challenge: you overcome the challenge or the challenge overcomes you.

If you overcome it, you gain the strength of the challenge. It literally becomes transmuted into you.

If it overcomes you, it’s good emotional content to look back over and reassess where you fell short. The next time a similar challenge comes around you have experience and you are stronger, so the chances of you engaging in escapism for that experience are lower.

But what happens when you run?

When you run, you avoid the pain for a little while. But then you gain nothing. You don’t grow stronger, you most likely grow weaker.

But without fail, life always comes back around to collect its share. You may be ready at a later date…but can you be so sure? After all, you’ll be older, more time would have passed, you may not even be ready to emotionally deal with it….in general, it’s just good to get things out the way now instead of later.

Because after all, “now” becomes “later” in the future.

There's only two outcomes to a challenge: you overcome the challenge or the challenge overcomes you. Share on X

Areas Where People Commonly Run Away From Their Problems and Pain

As you can see, escapism and avoiding reality is an attempt to shove reality to the side because dealing with real life is just too painful.

I’ve touched on the how, but what’s the why? What areas do people try to escape from? These are just a few, so you can know what to look out for:

Lack of Self-Esteem

If you lack confidence or self-esteem, you’re going to try to find it in the external world. It may be in the form of validation on social media or attempting to sleep with tons of women to prove your masculinity.

Lack of Finances or Economics

Being broke is a doozy to one’s self-confidence and your ability to provide for yourself and your inherent needs. You’ll try to escape this reality by spending money you don’t have (credit cards) or even losing yourself in TV or video games just to get your mind off of your bad state.

Lack of Proactive Family Life

If you’re on the younger side, you may have parents who were/are teetering on the edge of dysfunction and just weren’t present enough to provide for your emotional or physical needs. This is a painful feeling and you’ll try to escape in many different ways.

Lack of Career/Scholastic Achievement

If you’re working or at school, you may find it hard to do well in your career or at school, so you just sort of tune everyone and everything out. It’s not uncommon for someone in this situation to binge on Netflix, watch endless amounts of TV, or play video games just to forget that area of their life.

Lack of Friends/Social Life

Social isolation can really fuck you up. Human beings are social creatures, so we’ll do anything to get social contact. If you suffer from social anxiety or find it incredibly difficult to be social, you’ll escape through social media or some other digital outlet. We all need people. We all need friends.

Lack of Sexual or Romantic Relationships

This is a big deprivation for many guys especially in their adolescent to 20s. Many guys are afraid of women, don’t know how to talk to women, or just “aren’t that guy” for romantic relationships. If this is you, you’ll find that you may often escape into the world of online pornography just to get some sexual gratification.

Lack of Stimulation/Excitement

In general, being bored is a large trigger for wanting to escape from your reality. You’ll do almost anything and everything from using social media during tough projects at work, to taking drugs because your life is just one big swirl of monotony/bleakness.

Defenses Against Escapism: How to Stop Running Away From Life’s Challenges

Life’s not so bad once you get out there and start living.

But if you want to stop running away from your problems, you need some strong and compelling anchors.

These aren’t definitive, but they can be seen as good guards against wanting to run away from life.

Develop Your Internal Locus of Control

You feel happy and optimistic to the degree which you feel you have control over your life. On the other hand, you feel miserable and disillusioned to the degree which you feel you don’t have control over your life.

What I just described is an internal locus of control and external locus of control, respectively.

If you focus on:

• Developing goals
• Getting better in life (aka “self-improvement”)
• Stand up to the challenges life presents and not be afraid
• Looking for constructive ways to deal with problems and not resort to escapism

You have a strong internal locus of control. If you:

• Look to blame other people for your failures
• Use the resources of others and don’t develop your own
• Throw your hands up in resignation when challenges arises and break
• Watch the news and say “the world’s all fucked man, no point in doing anything“

I’m sorry to say: you have a strong external locus of control.

The degree to which you escape reality will be dictated by how much you lean to either side of this equation.

If you’d like more help on getting out of this victim mindset and developing a strong internal locus of control, I’d recommend you read: Develop Your Internal Locus of Control: 4 Tactics to Become Master of Your Reality. It’s full of ways to help you do just that.

Develop Your Inner Game

The phrase “inner game” is most related to pickup in the modern day, but it stretches back much further.

The phrase “inner game” first gained prominence in 1974 with the publication of The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey.

Gallwey, a tennis coach, coined the term “inner game“ to describe the mental dimension of sports performance that runs in parallel to the external game. As he wrote in the book:

“every game is composed of two parts, an outer game and an inner game”.

This concept then spread to other domains as various people and psychologists realized that life is heavily dependent on the inner game.​

Regardless of when it was first used, inner game refers to your internal mental ecosystem and the collective expression of various parts of your psychology and its ability to produce favorable life outcomes.

While every area of your life has its “inner game”, you have an overall barometer that is a good indicator regarding your overall competency in life.

Without strong inner game you will hit a “ceiling” until you can increase your levels in a certain life area. This is a large part of the reason why people work with coaches of all sorts, in an attempt to increase this area of their life.

Strong inner game is crucial to helping fight back against escapism.

If you’d like to learn more about inner game, check out my post on inner game fundamentals.

Dopamine Detox

The dopamine detox is a framework for removing low value stimulation that is growing in popularity. It’s growing in popularity because many people are realizing the ways that the modern world is set up to get them to contribute resources of value (time, money, and energy) to things that have little or no value.

A dopamine detox is a good way to restrict the amount of escapism in your life so that you can engage with it in a more productive and life-giving fashion.

Start Taking Responsibility

The “r” word is the word that kids don’t like to hear. A lot of adults don’t like it either because they feel it restricts their freedom in some way.

That “r” word is of course, responsibility.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but the more responsibilities you have, the less you’re inclined to run away.

Think about it: who is more likely to escape their life? A 35 year old with a wife, kids, a job, a mortgage he has to pay for, and a lifestyle he has to provide for or a 25 year old man who has no one to take care of but himself.

Sounds crazy, but the latter. The former can’t just bail without some serious long term consequences. On the other hand, if the 25 year old wants to say “fuck it”, sell his shit, take a one way flight to Hawaii, and just party – there’s nothing stopping him.

This is called “lock-in/sunk cost theory”. The more set on a course of action you are, the more likely you are to continue that course of action to its end (even if it isn’t beneficial).

Having some sort of responsibility in your life (even if it’s as small as a job) will keep you accountable and prevent you from doing stupid shit.

You’re less likely to spend tons of money foolishly if you know you have rent due in a week and you’re less likely to drink yourself stupid on a Tuesday if you have work the next morning.

Structure

Going along with responsibility is “structure”.

As I mentioned before, there were institutions that used to give human beings structure, namely church, family, and corporate. Those institutions are becoming more pushed to the corner by the day, so it’s up to the individual to create his own structure.

My recommendation is to write it out on paper.

Take some time and think about:

• Organizations you want to get involved in
• Things you will and won’t do
• Places you will and won’t go
• Foods you will and won’t eat
• Types of friends you have
• Bed times and wake times
• Financial considerations
• Etc.

In general, you want to organize your life as much as possible and create restraints on your activity and place them in a confined area.

Developing a Stoic Mentality

Stoicism is another belief structure that embraces reality as much as possible in order to create effective solutions to dealing with problems.

That’s the 21st century definition, anyway.

Being stoic in the face of adversity means facing it head on and developing a type of…nonattachment.

What’s a good example of this?

Let’s say you’re applying for a job. This is a job you’ve always wanted. It fits your skills, you like the company, you like the people. You’re a perfect fit. You go on for rounds of on-site interviews.

You don’t get the job. All that time wasted! All that effort! So close!

What do you do? Do you sulk and crawl up in the fetal position? Do you cry and whine about it?

If you take a stoic approach to life, none of that will happen. You accept it, take a deep breath and say:

There’s more jobs out there.

It’s being proactive instead of being reactive. 

It’s about accepting what is, instead of running into what isn’t.

The truly detached man never loses, he only learns. #zen Share on X

Monk Mode

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2UAOGJ1Fgvyv0fMhGtsOx7?si=f2gBatmNQMav6dE3BqE87A

There’s one more way, but it could be drastic for some. It’s called “monk mode“.

This is a period of removing most or all forms of artificial stimulus for a certain period of time. It means no social media, no YouTube, no random Internet browsing, nothing that isn’t productive in the sense of getting work done or being with other people (on a lower level version).

The intention is to deprive yourself of this type of digital entertainment for a period of time so the brain rewires and is motivated to get out there and be with other people.

It’s highly effective if you can pull it off. I’d recommend it.

Conclusion (It’s Up to You)

It’s all on you if you want to become someone who takes reality head on instead of running away every time.

It’s not something you do all at once. If you’ve spent your life ducking into the dark alleyways of video gaming, late night Netflix, or other escapist measures, you’ll find that once you realize you’ve been running away from life it will start to cascade on you very quickly. It can be pretty overwhelming.

The best way it to small chunk it and take it a step at a time, not losing momentum along the way.

Slowly, you will start to build up and become someone who faces life head on.

Do you have any strategies to beat escapism and stop running from life? Sound off in the comments below!