Short answers, pulled from the story.
Escapism is mental diversion from unpleasant aspects of daily life, typically through activities involving imagination or entertainment. The Oxford English Dictionary defined it as the tendency to seek distraction from what normally has to be endured. The word often carries a negative charge because it suggests a person who is unwilling or unable to connect meaningfully with the world and take necessary action.
C. S. Lewis argued, with humor, that the usual enemies of escape were jailers, and that escapism used in moderation could refresh and expand imaginative powers. J. R. R. Tolkien defended escapism in fantasy literature as the creative expression of reality within a secondary imaginative world, though he insisted that fantasy required an element of horror if it was not to be mere escapism.
Frode Stenseng, a Norwegian psychologist, developed the escape scale to measure two distinct forms of escapism in people's favorite activities such as sports, arts, and gaming. The first form, self-suppression, involves escaping from unpleasant thoughts and emotions. The second, self-expansion, involves seeking positive experiences and discovering new aspects of oneself.
After the stock market crash of 1929, magazines, radio, and movies all shifted toward material that helped people mentally escape mass poverty. Life magazine, hugely popular in the 1930s, ran pictures of bathing beauties, sports heroes, and ship launchings with no indication of the depression. Director Preston Sturges explored this phenomenon in his film Sullivan's Travels, arguing that comedy served a genuine social function during the crisis.
Ernst Bloch argued that utopias and images of fulfillment, even regressive ones, contained an impetus for radical social change. He wrote that social justice could not be realized without seeing things fundamentally differently. What a technological-rational society dismisses as mere daydreaming could function as an immature, but honest substitute for revolution.
H. G. Wells's The Time Machine depicts the Eloi, a future race whose happy lifestyle becomes horrifying, as a critique of classism. Fahrenheit 451 features television and seashell radios as tools to escape strict regulations. The 2009 films Summer Wars and Gamer both portray virtual worlds as extensions of social evolution, with society becoming detached from physical reality.