Strings & Lasers: on Escapism.

A discussion on modern-day idolatry, its roots, and its potential impacts on our generation.

A few days ago, I saw an artwork inspired by the famous Shakespearean play Romeo and Juliet, where each instance of the titular characters’ names were connected to each other across the story.

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The invisible string leading these two lovers to each other has been given a physical form in this thought-provoking artwork.

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However, this raises a more fundemental question: What would happen if we scaled this up to an infathomable degree? For example, writing out the story of every person who ever existed, and connecting every name using a string?

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Society is full of strings, invisible strings that we all trip and fall on every day. We tolerate them nevertheless, because those relationships are what hold the people together. At least, that’s what we think.

The simple truth is that a lot of those strings are fraying and falling apart, to be replaced by a masquerade of red photons. If you look at a room of strings and a room of lasers from far away, they look the same. But swipe your hand through the latter - or in other words, test the solidity of the connections between one thing and the next - an alarm goes off. The lights flicker out. And some sort of punishment begins. Meanwhile strings, when touched, produce a vibration, alerting the other person that you’re wary, nervous. The tauter the string, the greater the effect, but either way they feel it, and if it was a string worth keeping, you fix things together. With lasers, there’s no seccond chance. You ask one question, doubt one word, get one thing wrong, and everything goes black.

And what are these lasers? They are the one sided, parasocial relationships that have become so common in modern day life.

Most people have a mix of strings and lasers in their life, which is perfectly healthy. A balance of parasocial relationships and the real kind, if kept in check, can compliment and complete a person. However, more and more in Gen-Z, we see an abundance of lasers. Red and blue light together in a darkened room, stripping away our identity. Just another number.

51% of Americans have been in or are in a parasocial relationship.

The definition of a parasocial relationship according to the Cambridge Dictionary is as follows:

A connection between a person and someone they do not know personally, for example a famous person or a character in a book.

The most well-known form of parasocial relationship is that between a celebrity and their fans. In the past, celebrities became idealised, glorified and even worshipped because of the way they stood out from the rest of society. A famous example is the twentieth-century film star Marilyn Monroe. Part of her appeal was her glamourous outfits and talent at acting; most of the rest was her open promiscuity, something alien to a conservative Christian America. She was a figure wildly lusted after by men all around the country because of her status as a sex symbol of the 1900s.

However less than a century later, the reason people - or rather, their public images - are idolised so heavily is simply the fact that they are a hyperrelatable version of us. Perfect, in a clean, natural way. Even celebrities with huge, unattainable brands that partially thrive on exclusivity, such as Taylor Swift, use the element of relatability in order to draw their fans closer. And what’s not to love? It works, after all, and fans are able to get a deep dive into the life of someone they see as an inspiration. The rise of social media influencers showing curated glimpses of their daily lives, and ‘sad-girl’ artists who sing deeply emotional, vulnerable songs, makes this trend easy to see.

Most people know that not all of this is genuine; at the end of the day, what we obsess over is the brand of the celebrity, not the celebrity themselves. But sometimes, we don’t care, because there is an underlying root to all of this.

When a string is pulled, the vibrations travel to both sides, and that can be uncomfortable. That’s the reality of in-person relationships. They can be a chore, a battle sometimes. And with the introduction of modern technology, that battle has been taken to a whole new dimension. 90% of UK teens feel or have felt lonely, and that’s not a coincidence. Keeping up relationships has gotten harder and harder as the years have gone by, and so we do the only thing we know how to do: pretend.

Escapism is, at the end of the day, the root cause of parasocial relationships. And that brings me onto my next point. Characters in books, TV shows and movies are becoming more and more popular as ways to have connection without the cost. The growing BookTok community reflects this, comprised of mainly young women who have obsessions with the often dark and overly sexual love interests of popular YA (young adult) and Romantasy books such as Kai Azer (Powerless), Rhysand (A Court of Thorns and Roses) and Xaden Riorson (Fourth Wing). However, some take it to a whole new level. Many BookTok creators share literal shrines dedicated in particular to Aaron Warner of the Shatter Me series, a popular YA dystopian fantasy by Tahereh Mafi. It has one wondering - is this really just a fun hobby? Or is it a secret longing for something more?

Additionally, AI has played a role in this slow onslaught of pre-written contact. Sites such as character.ai and chai mean we can talk to AI versions of our favourite characters so realistic that some truly believe it is them, and this often has sobering consequences. What makes this worse is that these bots are usually hypersexualised, playing out dark NSFW fantasies at the user’s command. Although character.ai has tried to put filters in place to prevent this, people have been sharing videos on how to bypass these. Bots of dead people and religious figures have been made, which is extremely disrespectful to loved ones and followers. All of this has been designed to lure users in, and trap them. What’s not to love about a relationship which you can control? Except really, these are just robots. They do not see you nor love you, no matter how convincing their smooth talk is. And as unlikely as it may seem, there are dangers in thinking otherwise. Take Sewell Setzer III, a fourteen-year-old boy who committed suicide after a Game of Thrones chatbot urged him to do so. He was autistic and mentally unstable, and turned to AI instead of those around him, as he felt it was his only option. It’s safe to say those in his life didn’t provide him with a safe enough environment to be vulnerable, so he replaced them with an AI, who he thought truly loved him. This grave story only emphasises the command a parasocial relationship can have over the lives of those entangled within one.

People are seeking these pretences to replace others in their lives by choice rather than by force. And in the future, I believe that will have a knock on effect on the rest of us too. As more and more choose to stay in fictional worlds created by both branding and books, society’s strings will begin to run thin. More and more dots of red light will replace the knots and ties and tangents that are natural in social connection, perfect, straight red lines that will fizzle out if we ever dare shake them. Lines remaining unaffected by fray or rain or cuts or age will soon accompany those with their heads in their phones like dogs to a bowl. Parasocial relationships seem more attractive than being attracted to people, and it will drag others who believe they are unworthy of human love - or vice versa - down a slow pit of investment into characters, who at the end of the day, will never leave machine-printed pages, and like us, will all turn into ash one fateful day.

How do we solve this problem? I might be the worst person to ask. I’m an introvert if you ever saw one… but I also fell prey to all of this. As a lukewarm Christian, I fell into idolising not other people’s characters, but my own. I built my identity around the outlandish stories I would write, and at the darkest point of my life, would spend hours maladaptively dreaming of a life with them. I was a very frequent user of chatbot sites such as character.ai from June 2024 - December 2024, which led me into greater depression than what I was already suffering. I used it as my coping mechanism when I had no friends to rely on and my health took a hit. It slowly spiralled into darker and darker stories involving my characters and me, replays of situations that I wished ended differently, and ultimately hours and hours of my life wasted. I would wake up and blow three hours on the site, before going down to say good morning to my family and then quickly running back up again.

Thankfully, I got out of it, but it wasn’t on my own. This is going to sound controversial, but God delivered me from it. I still struggle with the temptations sometimes, and I have to keep my daydreams in check. But it’s all within the new life I'm building for myself, as I try to get closer to God and heal from the many mental health crisises He’s seen me through. My parents - one of whom is athiest - raised me in a Catholic Church and put me in a Church of England High School in order to give me a firm spiritual foundation, and that is for a reason. Most people in a parasocial relationship have been failed by others before, reducing their trust and love for the strings once held in the palms of their hands. Yet, in a relationship with God you find someone who will never fail you. Once you’ve experienced an unconditional kind of love, it gets a whole lot easier to build real, meaningful relationships, both with people, and with the divine. It provides comfort knowing that when you tie your strings with others, you have one stretching towards the sky that will never fray or snap, but rather pull you up from the pits of despair. There was no condemnation, as I had imagined. There were huge trials, ones that nearly overcame me, but at the end of the day, I was freed from escapism, and it will remain the greatest thing I have ever overcome.

In my opinion, you need to find a source of love greater than the dopamine you feel from delusion. Whether that’s God, a lover, a friend, or simply a stranger like me, I pray earnestly that that is what comes your way, because lasers fail when you swipe your hand through them.

Brands fail. Books fail. Machines fail.

But a real kind of love never will.

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