Taylor Swift's Healthy Escapism

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As its title suggests, Taylor Swift’s “I Hate It Here” (from The Tortured Poets Department ) expresses an unabashed yearning for escapism. Trapped in a world of “mid-sized city hopes and small-town fears” from which she feels so alienated she is “scared to go outside,” she longs to flee this world and find a more meaningful one, even if it exists only in her mind.

It’s a sentiment with which most people can identify to some degree, the song has been streamed 76 million-plus times on Spotify. Despite the popularity of the song and the sentiment it conveys, however, its central message raises an interesting question. Is escapism a valid way of dealing with disillusionment and frustration? Does running away really solve anything, when the same problems we left behind will still be waiting for us when we return? According to a team of researchers at the University of Oslo, it all depends on the motivation behind our escape.

A Two-Dimensional Model of Escapism

In an exploration of adaptive and maladaptive functions of escapism, Stenseng and colleagues developed a “two-dimensional model” of escapism comprised of “self-expansion” (adaptive escapism) and “self-suppression” (maladaptive escapism). The model is grounded in the concept of “selfhood,” which they define as “people’s innate ability to monitor, assess, and reflect upon their self-presentations, aims, and goals, and their own identity.”

Living in a world that very often conflicts with these fundamental elements can undermine our sense of self, leaving us feeling, as Swift describes it in the song, “lonely,” “bitter,” and “worthless.” As a result of the conflict of self, people look for ways to “unwind from this constant self-consciousness through endorsement of activities that pull focus away from their self.” In other words, we want to escape.

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

Self-Suppression

Self-suppression is grounded in “prevention motives.” In this motivational mindset, we engage in an activity to “prevent, or suppress, troublesome thoughts and emotions,” and distract ourselves from “uncomfortable mental processes.” While such distraction may indeed offer an escape from our troubling thoughts, the emphasis on suppression ultimately makes the effort counterproductive, since the suppression of negative emotions dampens positive emotions at the same time.

Self-Expansion

Self-expansion, by contrast, is grounded in “promotion motives.” Driven by this motivational mindset, we pursue an activity, not to suppress negative thoughts, but to promote positive ones. It’s a matter of escaping toward something good, rather than running away from something bad. This is a fine distinction but an important one because people motivated by a promotion mindset “are likely to gain more positive effect during the activity engagement, but they also experience more long-term benefits from the engagement.”

Taylor Swift's Adaptive Escapism

The escapism Taylor Swift espouses in “I Hate It Here” is firmly grounded in a motivational mindset of self-expansion. Instead of running away from the world of “mid-sized city hopes and small-town fears” that she hates, she escapes to imaginary worlds of her own creation. “I will go to/ Secret gardens in my mind,” she sings, where “People need a key to get to/ The only one is mine.” And in another stanza she adds, “I will go to/ Lunar valleys in my mind/ When they found a better planet/ Only the gentle survived.”

Rather than dampening both negative and positive emotions, Swift’s self-expansive escape into her “inner life,” where she can “get lost on purpose,” elevates the positive emotions so that the negative ones simply don’t matter so much. “Lucid dreams like electricity/ The current flies through me/ And in my fantasies I rise above it/ And way up there, I actually love it.” Her self-expansive mindset allows her to rise above the negative emotions without dampening the positive ones.

One avenue of escape that Swift rejects in the song is the sort of nostalgia she and her friends engaged in when they were children. They would each pick a decade they could live in “instead of this.” “I’d say the 1830s/ But without all the racists/ And getting married off/ For the highest bid.” This qualification causes the friends to all “look down/ Cause it wasn’t fun now,” and in fact, “was never even fun back then,” leading her to conclude that “Nostalgia is a mind’s trick/ If I’d been there, I’d hate it.”

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The sort of nostalgic escape that she describes in this childish game is suppressive rather than expansive since the pleasure that is sought in the past can only be achieved by suppressing its negative elements (the racists and the bartered marriages). Such suppression wouldn't make the problems any less real, of course, but merely dampen their emotional impact—the "mind's trick" of nostalgia, and any other form of self-suppressive escapism.

The self-expansive escape Swift offers in “I Hate It Here,” and the relief from mid-sized city hopes and small-town fears it provides, may be temporary (the album is about Tortured Poets, after all), but it is adaptive rather than maladaptive in affirming positive emotions instead of merely suppressing negative ones.

Whatever her specific motivations may have been for writing it, Swift’s escape into the inner world of her imagination resulted in a great song that offers an avenue of self-expansive escapism to the 76 million people who have listened to it so far—and the millions of others who will undoubtedly listen to it in the future.