Fantasy, fairytales and escapism.
I have always loved both fairytales and fantastical stories. When I was depressed and all I could do was cry or bleed, my one avenue of escape was fiction - specifically well written fantasy fiction. I mused with friends at the time that it was funny really: if you told an adult 'I love to read!' they'd applaud you. If you told an adult 'I love to read fantasy so I stop hacking at my wrists for as long as it takes for the story to last!' they'd be a lot less happy. And yet, whilst fantasy was indeed my drug of choice (and scorned as infantile and foolish) I always wanted to retaliate that at least I wasn't drinking or shagging or taking drugs or roaming the streets at night or anything else parents fear a fourteen year old might do.
My vice was reading. If I hadn't slept, hadn't eaten, hadn't done my homework, the 'bad influence' to blame was a really good book. On one occasion I took the unabridged Les Miserables out of the school library on a Monday lunchtime, and returned it (read cover to cover) on a Wednesday lunchtime. I read the stupid Brick as I walked to school, on the train, before class, on my lap during class, at lunch, at home, most of the night until my eyes stopped focusing. I read that bastard in 48hs whilst attending school and studying for my GCSEs. That was how much I read, just so I wouldn't have to live with my own brain, or deal with any other stress.
About ten years later when I'd finished University and was staying at home for a bit whilst I found my feet, I ordered some books. Since there had been room in the address label, I'd given my name as Raven and my apartment as 'The Den Nest', despite the fact my name was legally something else at the time and I lived at the top of a huge victorian house and not a set of apartments. My father saw the parcel when it was delivered, and of course its damningly fanciful address label.
My father used to like to make predictions. He didn't use tarot or witchery, he only used knowledge and logic. (Which isn't to say one shouldn't apply knowledge and logic to witchcraft or tarot - one should.) It meant he was only good at making predictions about people he knew very well, but since these were the only people he could tell or be proved right about, I don't think he cared. My father liked being right. It wasn't a vindictive thing or a power thing, it was a Sherlock Holmes thing. He played the game for the game's own sake, and he liked to be right: liked to know that his knowledge and logic and reason had won. When he made predictions about people, he'd write them down, sign and date them like a legal document, then seal them in an envelope (with sticky-tape), name and date the envelope and lock them in his desk draw. And when he was proved right (which to my knowledge he always was) he'd present the person concerned with the sealed envelope and the incriminating date prooving how far back he'd known this would happen.
My father's prediction for me was that since he had seen I referred to myself as 'Raven' and claimed to live in a 'Den Nest' that I would always hide from reality and seek to exist in a fantasy world. I don't remember what I said after I'd read his prediction letter. I think I shrugged at him and said something like, 'And why not?' in response to his steely-eyed look of enquiry. I think he sighed and said something about practicality and making one's way in the world. I said nothing; I'd attempted suicide three times since I was thirteen and had arms full of scars - I thought it was rather obvious what I thought of reality.
It is a pity that I wasn't aware of an argument made by JRR Tolkien that I know of now, otherwise I would have told him. It might not have helped (my father had a low view of sci-fi and fantasy over all) but Tolkien had been a keen mind, an avid linguist, an Oxford professor, and received an CBE, which would I think tip the scales of my father's approval...
"I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?"
-J.R.R. Tolkien
"Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of "escape." I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers."
-C.S. Lewis
(As an aside, when I worked at the bookshop I had an encounter with an Asian lady who was learning English and so had a limited vocabulary, who demanded I give her, 'Book by Cly Staples Louise'. I hasten to add that the fact I couldn't understand at all was my own fault entirely, even as an Eng-Lit student I had never in my life heard of Lewis's full name so had no fucking idea that his first name was Clive or his middle name was Staples - something I hadn't ever previously considered name material before even for a pet.)
Had I more courage at the time, I might have made the argument my friends and I had discussed all those years ago. Everyone needs 'downtime' and a need to escape: through books, through video games, through hobbies, through the pub, through sex drugs and rock'n'roll, through whatever works.
We are not designed to work endlessly. We are not designed to exist for only what is productive or worthy. We will always crave not only the pleasurable but also the strange, the other, the new - why? - because we are too clever by half.
Because we have imagination.
And perhaps, if we fed that imagination even half as much as we fed the endless mundane drive towards goals that are just as ephemeral as any fantasy story, we might get further as a species.