But the more society itself is escapist, the more this shifts the ways
we escape from it. Let us take, for instance, the example of a city
dweller tied to a mobile ‘phone, a banking job requiring eight hours a
day looking at figures on a computer screen and then most evenings
chilling out watching TV with a movie or two at weekends plus a few
computer games. Almost the whole of his existence takes place in a
virtual world, yet to him it is his “reality”. He experiences a
pressing need to work at a computer screen, get emails, phone people
all day and receive calls, track the latest episodes of a couple of
soaps and see a movie representing some violent outdoor action scene in
LA. He considers this his real life routine, his “reality”. So what,
then, is “escapism” for this person? We could choose a few likely
examples from our list above – fishing, gardening, lifting weights and
hill walking. And joining a health club to lift weights could cost a
week’s salary or more.

But wait a minute – what is ‘work’ to an impoverished peasant in some
contemporary third world country? Fishing, gardening, lifting weights
and hill walking. For that peasant, escapism would be taking time out
to chat to friends on a mobile phone, watching TV instead of working in
the fields, sending emails or playing games on a computer or hill
walking to the local town to see a movie. Too much of that and his
subsistence farming would not even feed his children. So the actual
application of the term “escapism” depends heavily on the context of
“reality”. In an urban world ever more dominated by virtual media,
escapism may take us back to a kind of half way position between
subsistence and culture, where subsistence is too rough but culture is
too smooth, and the place escaped to is somewhere in between. This
intermediate place is what geographers call the ‘middle landscape’.
(Evans A, "This Virtual Life" 2003)