Living In A Fantasy

“Guess I’ll always have to be
Living in a fantasy
Though it won’t be really me
From now on.”

(From Even in the Quietest Moments, 1977, Supertramp)

Children have always created rich fantasy worlds, involving creative play, imagination, dreams, escapes and adventures.  They were themselves, nonetheless, rooted in physical reality.  That reality could be difficult and painful or exciting and adventurous.  Much of the time it was mundane and boring.  Most of us could distinguish between what was real and what was not, because it was hard to escape reality for long.

In the past, as children, we knew the people in our lives, and they knew us - whether we liked it or not, and whether our relationships were healthy or not.  Our environment was the physical world around us - at home, at school and in the neighbourhood.

My primary concern today, is that increasing numbers of young people are unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality.  They largely live their lives alone and online, and that world is what is ‘real’ to them.  The rest of life is simply an inconvenient - or even frightening - ‘bolt on’.  The inevitable result is that - just as the lyrics of the song say - ‘it won’t be really me from now on’.  Without being embodied and grounded in time and space, having real experiences with flesh-and-blood people, with all the complexity that brings, it is hard to work out who we are at all.  This leaves us with life-diminishing vulnerabilities.

While we are born with our own unique set of genetic traits and personalities, so much of whom we become is influenced by our personal relationships, our physical environment and our experiences of life - good, bad and indifferent.   The Harvard Center on the Developing Child has demonstrated that “growth promoting relationships are based on the child’s continuous give and take (‘serve and return’ interaction) with a human partner who provides what nothing else in the world can offer”.  [1] The most powerful, life-shaping element of our environment as children comes in the form of the close and loving relationships which we have with real people.  These relationships can take account of a child’s individual personality, developmental stage and needs.  They shape self-awareness and they stimulate the heart and mind.  An iPad or a smartphone, however interactive the app or the game, cannot replicate this.

In his recent book, Jonathan Haidt stresses that “Children need face-to-face, synchronous, embodied physical play” [2]. Our relationships cannot be the same when mediated through a screen which we can switch off at any moment, or when they involve people whom we have never met and whom we can instantly close down or ‘block’ with the tap of a thumb.  As E M Forster noted in his very prescient short story, The Machine Stops, the Machine “didn’t transmit nuances of expression.  It only gave a general idea of people” (his italics)[3]. Our environment needs to be physical - we need to learn to navigate it, to feel the hot and the cold, the rough and the smooth and to have those awkward encounters with risk and uncertainty if we are to grow up with the necessary resilience for life outside our bedroom.

It is no surprise that the real, physical world has now become an increasingly scary place, and that we find children “seized with the terrors of direct experience” that E M Forster describes.  The temptation is to retreat ever more frequently into a virtual world not grounded in time or space. This then becomes ‘real’, a world in which we can do anything at any time, and which primarily exists in the realms of sight and sound only. Most importantly, it is an environment over which we believe we have complete mastery.  

Of course, this is an illusion.  The influence of this vast and sprawling virtual world is insidious on many different levels.  It is one which is impossible to navigate safely without the reliable compass of real-life experience and an identity shaped by family and community.  While ‘untethered’ from reality, children become highly vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation.  This influences their sense of self, their perception of others and their sense of value in the world at the deepest level.  They become susceptible to being told who they should be, by unknown others who pose as ‘friends’, rather than developing a multi-faceted identity organically and over time, in relationship with others.  The ensuing insecurity often fuels crippling anxiety.

As a therapist, on meeting for the first time, I ask young people to tell me about themselves.  This usually amounts to a list of tick-box identities and diagnoses, all self-generated after endless hours online.  I’m met with a blank stare, when I say gently that I don’t mean any of that – I would like to hear about them, as a human being, along with their own thoughts, feelings and experiences.  Frequently, as our work continues, there can be concern over whether or not they have ticked the ‘right’ boxes.  It often takes a considerable amount of time for a young person to believe that I see them as a unique and valuable individual who is finding their feet in the world – not a much-travelled suitcase plastered in exotic labels, destined only for lost property.

Only a few years ago, young people would talk about things happening online or ‘in real life’ (IRL).  For many today, increasingly there is no such distinction.  It is common to hear children talk about ‘friends’ whom they have never met, and whose real identity is unknown.  They ‘play’ with others without ever leaving their bedroom.  They have ‘relationships’ with avatars, conducted only in a perplexing mix of text speak and emojis.  What they are told about the identity of those with whom they interact online is taken entirely at face value. 

How about the girl or boy that they ‘got with’ at the weekend?  Here, the young person means that that they exchanged sexually explicit messages with someone whose profile picture suggested that they were an attractive and available young person.  The profile name is a random collection of letters and numbers, but to ask their real name would be ‘stalkerish’.  The worst thing that can happen in this situation, of course, is that they ‘catch feelings’ for the person out there in the ether - this stranger whom they have never met.  Experiencing an increase in pulse rate, butterflies in the stomach and sweaty palms are too real a reminder of their humanity. It is profoundly unsettling, and often taken as proof that there is ‘something wrong with them’, which they would like me to ‘fix’.

Bizarrely, all of this is happening in an atmosphere where ‘authenticity’ is one of the most highly rated attributes a person can be seen to have.   It is apparently ‘authentic’ not to know someone’s real name, who they are and where they live, when historically we all knew those things about the people with whom we were connected.  While images are airbrushed, videos are scripted and that ‘casual’ selfie took an hour to create, they keep scrolling, believing that people are demonstrating their ‘authenticity’.  They want to believe that someone having a panic attack - or worse - online for their entertainment or education, just happened to leave the camera rolling by accident.  They want to think - and many young people actually do think - that this carefully curated content is real life.

This presents a very obvious problem, caused by some very genuine human feelings - the urge to compare, contrast and compete with others.  The depressing truth – literally, for many – is that reality, in all its messy complexity, cannot compete with this seemingly effortless perfection.  However, many ‘tutorials’ they watch, most teenage girls will never resemble some Barbie-like avatar.  Young men are extremely unlikely to encounter the pneumatic, and ever-obliging women who feature in the extreme and degrading pornography they watch.

There was a time when someone whose grasp on reality had become shaky would have their beliefs or behaviour put into perspective by others around them.  Those around us, who knew us well, could challenge us and offer a foothold in reality.  Now, whatever bizarre interests or erroneous beliefs we may have, it is possible to find numerous ‘communities’ online to ‘affirm’ us.  Far from contextualising, challenging or moderating our beliefs, these groups can actively normalise and encourage our aberrant thoughts. Confused and hurting children now find a ready-made community of strangers – often driven by ideology or their own dysfunction – which welcomes them, endorses and celebrates their feelings, while seducing them down an ever-more extreme and destructive path. 

Used to manipulating situations online, young people start to believe that they can do the same thing easily and without consequences in the real world.  For example, if they hurt people, or even kill them off, they can just start the game again.  If they can build an avatar to reflect who they think they are, and how they wish to appear – what’s the difference in modifying their own body?  After all, it is no more ‘real’.  This is a particularly pernicious idea when the emotional distress of so many children is manifested in a turning away from their own bodies and a rejection of the authentic selves which they believe are so unacceptable. 

We see this in self-harm and also in extreme body modification, such as extensive tattoos and multiple piercings, where the openly admitted aim is to ‘feel the pain’.  We see this in disordered eating and the desire to reduce the physical body to nothing or use a natural need for nurture as a means of control.  We see this in a denial of the reality of biological sex, and the desperate desire for drugs and surgery to soothe emotional distress, while buying into the fantasy that you can be any gender or none, just because you feel like it.

Much has been written about limiting the use of smart phones in schools, setting age limits for social media accounts, and ensuring that more learning in school is done with pen, paper and traditional books.  This is a start, but in fact we need a fundamental rethink of our relationship with the online world if we are to avoid the fictional picture painted by E M Forster of a society where “men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul”.  Technology is a tool to assist us - it is not in our best interests for it to replace real life.  After all, one day the Machine might stop.

Centuries ago, without any of the benefits of modern science, our ancestors knew that integration of body, mind and spirit are essential if we are to be healthy.  Physical facts, thoughts and feelings all matter and we then need to be connected to others in all three dimensions.  In the fourteenth century, St Gregory of Palamas declared that “the human being is a single, united whole…  Our body is not an enemy, but partner and collaborator with the soul”[4]. We cannot actually ‘live’ only online, if we are to have life and live that life in all its fullness.  As therapists, we need to lead the way in challenging the current primacy of fantasy over reality - and the collusion with delusion which is so damaging for our young people.  Our children most certainly need and deserve something more, if we are to stem the current ‘mental health crisis’.

“You think I’m crazy, I can see
It’s you for you and me for me
Living in a fantasy
From now on”.

References:

[1]  National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. (2004). Young children develop in an environment of relationships. Working Paper No. 1. Retrieved from http://www.developingchild.net

[2]  Haidt, J, (2024), The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Allen Lane.

[3]  Twentieth Century Short Stories, (1959), The Machine Stops, E M Forster, Harrap.

[4]  Ware, T, (2015), The Orthodox Church, Penguin.

Lucy Beney, Save Mental Health’s Correspondent on Child Mental Health.
Lucy, of Thoughtful Therapists is an Integrative Counsellor working in private practice and also a facilitator for the Tuning into Teens parenting programme.