The desire to take shelter from a frightening or unbearable reality has been familiar to humankind since ancient times. During the crisis of the Roman Republic, the German historian Theodor Mommsen documented how chaos and instability gave rise to a mass flight among the Romans. Many citizens, disillusioned with politics, increasingly withdrew from public life, secluded themselves on their country estates, and devoted their time to literature and philosophy. This retreat from reality became a form of psychological self-defence — a means of constructing a safe and controllable world within one’s own imagination. Today, two millennia later, the underlying mechanism remains the same, yet the instruments forged by technological progress have grown considerably more sophisticated. One such phenomenon is the uncontrolled consumption of films and television series.

In contemporary usage, the term “escapism” is understood as a form of avoidance. Modern psychiatry employs the concept to denote behaviour aimed at withdrawing from a frustrating situation. A more existential perspective is offered by E. Trufanova, who defines escapism as “a flight in search of meaning.” According to her conception, escapism is not merely a defensive reaction but a fundamental property of the psyche, rooted in the drive to compensate for a deficit of meaning through the construction of subjective realities. This approach explains why films and series, in particular, have become one of the principal “refuges”: a narrated story offers the viewer the illusion of an ordered world, in which events follow a coherent logic of cause and effect.

Contemporary research confirms this trend. In 2025, Ingosstrakh and ON Media conducted a survey whose findings revealed that more than half of Russians (51%) identify stress as a frequent companion, while the most vulnerable demographic proved to be young adults aged 25–34, 33% of whom experience stress on a daily basis. As the principal means of coping with tension, respondents cited the consumption of video content (30%), on a par with communication with loved ones, while series emerged as the leading category of stress-reducing content (61%).

It is equally necessary to differentiate between forms of escapism. E. Belovol and A. Kardapoltseva have empirically distinguished “positive escapism,” associated with creative self-realisation and systematic reflection, from “negative escapism,” grounded in the avoidance of problems. The latter extreme is manifested in uncontrolled viewing, when series are transformed from a source of inspiration into an instrument of flight. According to V. Belov, the boundary between leisure and avoidance is established by dependency: as soon as a compensatory mechanism becomes an end in itself, the individual becomes estranged from his or her environment — at which point one may speak of fully formed escapist behaviour. This is empirically corroborated by the study of L. Shukshina and I. Kogai, which demonstrated that individuals prone to escapism merely reflect upon their problems rather than resolve them.

Thus, escapism within the contemporary youth milieu represents a complex and ambivalent phenomenon, combining both adaptive and maladaptive forms. An analysis of theoretical and empirical research demonstrates that the key factor distinguishing “positive” from “negative” escapism lies in the degree of the subject’s self-awareness and capacity for reflection. It is precisely the ability to make sense of one’s own experience that enables media content to be employed not as a means of flight, but as an instrument of personal growth and a reappraisal of reality.