Virtual Addiction

Before humans developed symbolic language, separating the mind from the body might have been impossible. The very concepts of "mind" and "body" depend entirely on the words we apply to them and the categorization those words encourage. For all their obvious intelligence, non-human animals seem incapable of making this distinction. Can you imagine a dolphin decoupling its mental intentions from its fluid, bodily experience? I cannot.

But once humans developed an inner realm of words and ideas, the virtual reality of thought began to compete with the actual reality of embodied life. As we depended more on ideas to invent technologies and manipulate our environment, mental concepts began to overshadow somatic realities. Practicing mindfulness meditation is a swift way to learn how easily the physical body fades from view when the mind starts thinking.

What do we really mean when we say someone is “lost in thought”? It is a condition where thinking takes over so completely that the person loses touch with their immediate environment, their somatic sensations, and ultimately, the body itself. Symbolic thinking gave humans the spectacular capacity to elaborate vast mental worlds. This is undeniably useful for planning, and it can even be a sanctuary when the tangible world is too painful to bear. Still, the mind tends to suck us in until we are thoroughly lost.

The Evolution of Escapism

Our species’ retreat from the body likely began slowly. As tribespeople telling stories around a campfire, we explored a realm of imagery that still directly overlapped with the weave of nature. Tales of wily animals, magical plants, and powerful spirits aligned seamlessly with daily lives spent interacting with the wild, where knowledge was always incomplete and mystery abounded. Meaning-making was adaptive; it helped us survive and spread across the globe.

But as humanity built civilizations, our mythologies grew less relevant to our immediate sensory experience. Animals, plants, ancestors, and nature spirits were progressively edited out of our narratives, and abstract, distant gods moved in. Imaginal realms rooted in wild landscapes gave way to morality tales featuring unseen heavens and hells as rewards and punishments. Attention was systematically removed from concrete, organic reality and placed into a virtual reality, rife with conceptual dogma.

Along the way, increasingly complex technologies entrenched us ever deeper in thought. We can trace a direct line of somatic desertion from the printing press and the novel, to the radio, to television, and finally to the smartphone. Walk into almost any public space today, and most of the population is staring into a handheld device. We are often more in touch with digital technologies than with our own physical bodies.

The Varieties of Escape

This escapism takes many forms. Consider the modern obsession with travel. As someone who dislikes leaving home, I admit to a personal bias. Yet it is easy to view global tourism as a socially sanctioned way of escaping real life. It is highly seductive because it takes us to real places with real people—it can seem like an immersion in reality rather than an escape from it. Yet our connection to those places is temporary, our interactions are largely transactional, and locals often resent our tourism even as profit from our spending. 

When I listen to regular travelers, their stories often seem as much about the stresses of tourism as its enjoyments. Yet, whether difficult or easy, travel carries us away from our humdrum lives—and that seems to be the point.

My own life is very simple. I seldom do anything worth describing to others. It is deeply enjoyable, but in a predictable, unexciting way. Because of this, I struggle to know what to talk about beyond the realm of meditation and spirituality—the specific "special interest" of my autism spectrum diagnosis.

If I traveled, I would possess more "interesting stories." But what does it mean to have an interesting story? It means weaving an imagined, past world to share with someone else. While storytelling can bring people together, it connects us mind-to-mind, downplaying the present moment and the actual, tactile feeling of being alive here and now.

Travel is not the only offender. The cosmetic industry profits from an imaginary, unattainable ideal of beauty; the substance industries peddle alcohol, caffeine, and pharmaceuticals to alter our immediate state; even the military deals in a grand escapism, promising that if we conquer another country, we can avoid looking too closely at the rot within our own.

Theater of Mind: The Price of Admission

We pay a steep physical price for this mass migration into the head. Screen time damages our spines. Inactivity weakens our muscles. Hours spent roaming the halls of the intellect separate us from the warm, vital currents of our biology.

To be fair, escaping into the mind is sometimes a crucial survival strategy. When I was a boy navigating a terrifying and lonely home life, I survived by cultivating a rich fantasy world. I imagined living on a distant ranch, inside a high-tech grotto like Batman’s, or within a miniature town protected by an impervious, translucent dome. In my memory, those daydreams are just as vivid as the actual events of my childhood. They kept me sane.

But escaping into the mind, like any escape, is a medicine. We only need it when the tangible world feels broken. Children in embattled homes today find relief in video games; adults in numbing jobs or unhappy marriages find it in alcohol, pornography, gambling, etc. In every case, the sustainable solution is to work on altering the actual, lived environment rather than fleeing to a virtual one. True, that isn’t always possible, but we should be sure it is not before we choose escape over engagement.

Toward Flexibility

The habit of thinking rather than feeling doesn't come with the obvious downsides of alcoholism or gambling, but the destructive dynamics can be nearly identical—especially when our thoughts become repetitive, negative, and dispiriting.

Perhaps our ultimate goal should be flexibility. We can value the mind and its extraordinary evolutionary power while remaining alert to its pitfalls. We can use the mind’s virtual reality theater to plan, to review, and occasionally to rest. But we can strive to avoid losing ourselves in the world of imaginings. Whenever possible, our allegiance belongs to moment-by-moment reality. We turn off the screen, soothe our frantic brains, and savor the world right here, where our bodies breathe.