Taylor Swift’s healthy escapism | Psychology Today

As the title suggests, Taylor Swift’s “I Hate It Here” (from The Department for Tortured Poets ) expresses an undisguised yearning for escapism. Trapped in a world of “middle-town hopes and small-town fears” from which she feels so alienated that she’s “afraid to go outside,” she longs to escape that world and find a more meaningful one, even if it exists only in her imagination.

It’s a feeling that most people can relate to to some degree; the song has been streamed over 76 million times on Spotify. However, despite the popularity of the song and the feeling it conveys, its central message raises an interesting question. Is escapism an appropriate way to deal with disillusionment and frustration? Does running away really solve anything if the same problems we left behind are still waiting for us when we return? According to a team of researchers from the University of Oslo, it all depends on the motivation behind our escape.

A two-dimensional model of escapism

In examining the adaptive and maladaptive functions of escapism, Stenseng and colleagues developed a “two-dimensional model” of escapism consisting of “self-expansion” (adaptive escapism) and “self-suppression” (maladaptive escapism). The model is based on the concept of “selfhood,” which they define as “the innate human ability to monitor, evaluate, and reflect on one’s self-representation, goals, and self-identity.”

Living in a world that very often conflicts with these basic elements can undermine our self-esteem and leave us feeling, as Swift describes it in the song, “lonely,” “bitter,” and “worthless.” As a result of self-conflict, people look for ways to “get away from this constant self-consciousness by engaging in activities that take the focus off the self.” In other words, we want to escape.

This desire to escape is neither healthy nor unhealthy in and of itself. It is our motivation to escape that makes the difference, and the motivational mindsets from which the two dimensions of the researchers’ model derive are “antagonistically different.”

Self-suppression

Self-suppression is based on “prevention motives.” In this motivational attitude, we take action to “prevent or suppress disturbing thoughts and emotions” and distract ourselves from “unpleasant mental processes.” While such distraction may indeed offer us an escape from our disturbing thoughts, the emphasis on suppression ultimately makes these efforts counterproductive, since suppressing negative emotions simultaneously dampens positive emotions.

Self-expansion

Self-development, on the other hand, is based on “ascent motives.” Driven by this motivational mindset, we engage in an activity not to suppress negative thoughts but to promote positive ones. It’s about escaping toward something good rather than running away from something bad. This is a subtle but important distinction because people motivated by an ascent mindset “are likely to achieve more positive effects during the activity, but also experience more long-term benefits from the activity.”

Taylor Swift’s adaptive escapism

The escapism that Taylor Swift represents in “I Hate It Here” is firmly anchored in a motivational mindset of self-expansion. Instead of running away from She escapes the world of “middle-town hopes and small-town fears” that she hates To imaginary worlds that she herself created. “I will go in my mind to secret gardens,” she sings, where “people need a key to get there, the only one is mine.” And in another verse she adds, “I will go in my mind to moon valleys, when they found a better planet, only the gentle survived.”

Rather than dampening both negative and positive emotions, Swift’s self-expanding escape into her “inner life,” where she can “lose herself on purpose,” highlights the positive emotions so that the negative ones just don’t matter as much. “Lucid dreams like electricity/ The current runs through me/ And in my fantasies, I rise above it/ And at the top, I actually love it.” Her self-expanding mindset allows her to move beyond the negative emotions without dampening the positive ones.

One escape route Swift rejects in the song is the kind of nostalgia she and her friends had as children. They would each pick a decade to live in “instead of this one.” “I’d say the 1830s/ But without all the racists/ And get married/ For the highest commandment.” This limitation causes the friends to all “look down/ ‘Cause it wasn’t fun now,” and in fact, “it wasn’t even fun then,” leading them to conclude that “nostalgia is a trick of the mind/ If I had been there, I’d hate it.”

The kind of nostalgic escape she describes in this childish game is repressive rather than expansive, since the joy sought in the past can only be achieved by repressing its negative elements (the racists and the exchange marriages). Such repression would, of course, not make the problems any less real, but merely dull their emotional impact – the “mind trick” of nostalgia and any other form of self-repressive escape.

The self-expanding escape Swift offers in “I Hate It Here,” and the relief from mid-sized city hopes and small-town fears it offers, may be temporary (the album is about Tortured poets), but it is adaptive rather than maladaptive in that it seeks to reinforce positive emotions rather than merely suppress negative ones.

Whatever her specific motivations for writing this song, Swift’s escape into the inner world of her imagination resulted in a great song that offers an opportunity for self-fulfilling escapism to the 76 million people who have heard it so far – and the millions more who will undoubtedly hear it in the future.

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