

I’ve always believed that we best understand who we are when we are children. At age seven, we feel comfortable sharing our opinions, however tactless, our goals and dreams for our future. Then, we’re told what we should think and want and begin a discovery process.
We play instruments. Try different sports. Apply for programs. Job-hop. Meet people.
In elementary school, Rafi remained elusive to me. Our personalities were complementary but the first time I remember us conversing normally was in eleventh-grade English.
Recently, we reconnected through a mutual friend when I hosted a potluck late last year. Rafi brought homemade Tiramisu. My dad talks about how delicious the dessert was nearly every day.
Our group at dinner explored various topics. Rafi mentioned an upcoming trip to Costa Rica and addressed the possibility of working in a new city. He strives to explore and learn through his lifestyle but struggles with the idea that he may simply be trying to escape.
In October 2021, I went on a single date with a man named Max. He was a few years older and raised as an Orthodox Jew in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. He left religion to live in Miami, searching for la belle vie—life without serious love, worries, or problems.
“What is your vice?” he asked me.
“I don’t have one,” I replied.
“No drugs, alcohol,” he said as his list continued.
“No,” I answered. “Sometimes I listen to music too much.”
“That’s not a vice,” he noted.
Max worked as a programmer who probably had many vices. Though I had fewer, I was likely in the city for the same reason: to escape and recognize that no matter my geography, my problems followed me. I was still prone to mood swings and thought spells that the sun and açai bowls couldn’t fix.
Before the twentieth century, people were so consumed with the day-to-day tasks of life that they had little time to think about amusement. In North America, the 1910s and 1920s made way for new technologies, labour unions and growing cities.
The increased standard of living granted many a new commodity—free time. By 1929, when the Great Depression hit, people who were newly accustomed to leisure time, still relied on books, movies, music and even amusement parks to escape.
The word escapism was then born in the 1930s—to distract oneself from an unpleasant reality.
But is escapism always negative? Rafi and I dove into this question over lunch.
He’s considering working remotely for a month in Argentina or maybe New York. Naturally, his mind follows him to both places.
The alternative is to do nothing while life remains the same for 30 days.
I describe my time in Miami as complicated. “It could be the city,” I say, acknowledging that once we familiarize ourselves with somewhere new, life normalizes, and we realize that what we had was never truly unpleasant to begin with.
Yet for Rafi’s month? A month is a sweet escape. It’s like diving into a good book. It could offer him time to reflect on his next chapter while enjoying a new place.
For instance, I always desired to be an entrepreneur. As a teenager, I founded clubs and invented internships for myself at magazines but it was my seven-month escape to Miami that I credit with helping me understand myself.
Alone in a new place, I had time to think about my likes and dislikes, and what I admired and despised in the lives of others. Eventually, through years of reflection, I concluded what I knew in second grade—that I am independent, creative, imaginative, and like to spend time with those close to me.
In Rafi’s words, “Escapism isn’t just about running from something—it’s about chasing what could be.”
We may realize that staying in one place or settling for what’s comfortable could mean neglecting what makes us feel truly alive.
“Sometimes it’s not about fixing what’s in front of you but letting it go and finding something better. Escapism, in the right light, isn’t avoidance—it’s choosing to grow with the belief that there’s something out there worth our time,” he says.
Rafi is currently in Argentina for the month.
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
Shirley Jackson