Never before has there been a plethora of cheap entertainment available to help people escape from the woes of modern life.  During the Great Depression, people wanted to forget for a while that they were poor and the outlook was bleak.  Many turned to drinking away what little money they had.  Nowadays, we have a few more options than that.

While I won’t extol any virtues to alcohol (my father was an alcoholic), there are some other things out there now, in this last year of the first decade of the 21st Century, that provide a less destructive form of escapism.  We have the Internet, movies, and video games.

As a product, we can go to the movies for the relatively inexpensive price of a ticket.  Although this is getting untenable, especially if you live in a large metropolitan area and have kids, people still go.  And before this recession really slammed the country hard, many of us bought home theater systems with nice, high-definition televisions.  So now we watch movies through Netflix or buy them outright on DVD for multiple viewings.

Video games offer that same kind of escape, only more so.  Prices vary for each game, of course, but if you divide the number of hours spent on a game by the price, you can see quickly how much it’s worth for your own time.  Some people like quick puzzle games that are also cheap, but some like complex, involved RPGs on their consoles.  There’s a wide enough flavor of these out there to make just about everybody happy.

And if you’re still not satisfied, you can make your own games with inexpensive or free tools and share them with others.  Or put them out on the market for sale, though that does take some more work than you might be willing to commit time, effort, and possibly money to.

The Internet has its own diversions, with its myriad nooks and crannies that you can get lost in for hours at a time.  Try looking at just one article on Wikipedia.  It’s impossible.

The point is that we have an unprecedented number of options available to us in the modern world to give us that tiny bit of escape from our humdrum lives.  We don’t always want to be ourselves all of the time.  That would be boring.  Maybe we want to be Han Solo for a few hours of screen time, or assume the role of a night elf in World of Warcraft.

Is escapism bad?  I don’t think so.  Our minds and bodies need and crave it for the very simple fact that without it we would quite possibly lose mental faculties or develop neuroses, or, even worse, psychoses.  Think of it like a mini-vacation from the real world that you can afford right now without leaving the comfort of your home.

Whether imagined or real, people will seek an escape from their lives, if only for a short while.  The reasons are varied, such as stress relief from that bad day at work or trying to forget that you just got laid off from your job of ten years.  Either way, there’s something out there for anybody to do safely and securely.