The real world has plenty of frustrations. Society is set up to benefit plutocrats. The middle class has been shrinking for decades in many advanced countries; in some less-advanced countries, there never has been any healthy middle class. In theory, all of us alienated middle-class loners should be organizing with potential social allies to rescue our societies.

But in fact, many of us are too frustrated to organize reform movements. We might have repressed sadness, or lust, or rage, or other emotions. We can't vent those emotions politely -- and if we are ever caught being impolite, modern criminal punishment systems have ways to ensure that we will never have middle-class success. (E.g. a middle-class Trump-supporting wage slave who protests an allegedly rigged election can get sent to prison, after which he will never be hired for a middle-class job ever again). Although we have been raised to aspire to middle-class careers, many of us slide down into the precariat. We look at the two obvious options -- the easy road of indulging our vices, and the harder road of mortifying our vices.

Many of us take the easy road by getting addicted to some form of fantasy escapism -- anime, or Hollywood superhero movies, or computer games, or the like. If you do indulge in such escapism, you are damned, because it doesn't fix your psychological problems, and it definitely doesn't help you organize social reform. You are not likely to meet a reform-minded life partner by losing yourself in hedonism. If you turn some entertainment brand into your identity, you might find a few dysfunctional friends, but even in a group of rabid fans, you are just consumers waiting to be victimized by entertainment companies. (Recently Baldur's Gate 3 was released, and the rabid fanaticism of some of its fans is a spectacular example of groupthink. It's a good PC game, and I encourage everyone to enjoy it without building an identity around it.) I still indulge in fantasy escapism such as PC gaming, and I have enough energy to talk about it online, but people who go online to talk about games usually stoop to their personal worst and use every discussion as an opportunity to vomit their unresolved rage over the Internet. Maybe this is entertaining for a lot of people, but it is not uplifting for anyone.

Consider the other road: if you don't indulge in fantasy escapism, you are damned, because you are so miserable and alienated and burned out that you probably don't have the energy to find some healthier means of self-therapy, such as stoic philosophy or weightlifting. In the best case, you can make your body slightly healthier by lifting weights or the like, but that will eat up whatever time and energy you might have had to really think about your own psychological and social problems. It's like giving a couple of beers to a cancer patient -- it's barely enough to take the edge off the pain, and it does nothing to solve the underlying problem. Unlike fantasy entertainment, weightlifting does not inspire me to chat online. Exercise gets me too tired to chat, so after exercise I don't want to go online and find like-minded lifters; I just want water, food, and sleep. My few social interactions with other weightlifters give me little hope. (The fanaticism of some weightlifters makes me wonder whether it is just a slightly healthier form of escapism, but that's a topic for another post.)

In theory, lifting weights and similar self-improvement habits is noble and uplifting and so on but I've been lifting weights for years and I don't feel very uplifted. In fact, despite aspiring to self-discipline, I have never completely given up on fantasy escapism. Lifting weights in between PC gaming sessions has not led to any kind of balanced life for me.

In theory, a wise man would be able to find a "middle road" between self-indulgence and self-discipline, but in the past, I have not been wise enough to do so reliably. Even now, with fairly stable self-discipline habits, I don't feel that I have enough wisdom to teach anything about self-discipline to others.

In theory, entertainment doesn't have to be escapist fantasy. In theory, artists can create socially relevant entertainment that motivates alienated loners to join realistic, pragmatic social reform movements. In practice, it's hard to create any good art, and it's damn near impossible to create socially responsible art. So as far as I can tell, we're all just damned if we do and damned if we don't.