I Used to Love ‘Selling Sunset.’ Now Escapism Is Wearing Thin

I’m no real estate freak. And if not for splitting rent with my partner, I wouldn’t be able to afford my one-bedroom apartment.

Yet, last summer, I became hooked by a world of million-dollar commissions, mansion aerial shots and grown women bullying each other.

Selling Sunset is a softly scripted docu-soap centring on an all-female team of millionaire real estate agents working for a brokerage owned by a pair of twin brothers in Los Angeles.

I’m not the only being sold on its “recession-proof fantasy.” From January to June last year, episodes were viewed 4.9 million times and totalled 31.6 million hours in streaming time. Netflix has renewed the show for a ninth season.

“My reality-addled brain is reassured by its soft lighting and soothed into a childlike stupor by its many smooth, metallic surfaces,” wrote Rayne Fisher-Quann of the show for Next Magazine.

“Every clip of dialogue is immediately followed by a low-budget pop song that explains the emotions I should be feeling (empowerment, suspense, girl-bossery) in explicit detail, rendering critical thought obsolete.

“Watching this show is like doing Xanax in an Apple Store. When Selling Sunset turns on, the communism turns off!”

The reality show launched in 2019 and received a surge of new viewers in the early stages of the pandemic the following year.

“I think people just wanted an escape. People love to see the homes. They got to see people going out, doing things, and enjoying life,” the show’s executive producer Adam DiVello told the Independent at the time. “Nobody was wearing masks at the time [of filming].”

I wasn’t one of the show’s early-pandemic viewers, but it’s become a prominent presence in my TV diet. I come back again and again for its ability to suffocate the relentless chatter in the back of my mind. The chatter that tells me I’m behind in life if I don’t yet have a plan to buy a $500,000 condo, or that chastises me for not really understanding RRSPs at the age of 27.

More than anything, its outsized opulence drowns out the many moments when I’m uncomfortably confronted with the real-life wealth disparities all around me.

Why escapism makes sense, especially now

The purpose of escapist entertainment is to “draw us away from our everyday troubles, and, sometimes, to help us fantasize ourselves as better, more important and better off than we really are,” wrote John L. Longeway in a 1990 study on the rationality of escapism and self-deception.

“Indulgence in such entertainment helps us avoid, temporarily, unpleasant truths that we must live with.”

We shouldn’t feel irrational in this approach, argued Longeway, since it can help a person “avoid succumbing irrationally to despair” or can compensate for an environment “in which it is otherwise impossible for an optimally functioning person to survive emotionally.”

Escapism is more tempting than ever in the digital age and is often associated with guilt or laziness. But some are unlearning those narratives, teaching each other to normalize radical rest and permit healthy doses of escapism with the popularization of concepts like “rot day.”

As one creator described it, rot days are when “you literally sit on the couch and you just rot. You don’t do anything. I shower, I do my skin care, I put on some comfy pyjamas and socks, I do a little red-light therapy, sit with my pup and fiancé, we watch shows, we read, and then when we’re done, we go to bed.”

Still, all of this can lead to dangerous levels of avoidance. As Haley Nahman wrote in a recent Substack essay, “rotting may have a particular posture, but I think what separates it from other activities that involve horizontal entertainment is its catalyst: avoidance — the avoidance of responsibility, pressure, uncertainty, anxiety, thoughts.”

Using escapism as a tool for survival is a lens for understanding substance use disorder, notes a 2010 study on how the brain responds to stress. While avoidance and escape are natural adaptive behaviours, write the authors, substance abuse is “characterized by chronic ritualized forms of avoidance and escape behaviour that are designed to control or modify external or internal (i.e., thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations) threats.”

I think a lot about an idea argued in Gabor and Daniel Maté’s book The Myth of Normal: that society has created the perfect conditions for its populace to be depressed, anxious and traumatized.

Following this logic, it makes perfect sense that people would be searching for all kinds of means of escape.

Cracks in the foundation

Lately, my love of Selling Sunset has started to show signs of wear. The show’s newest spinoff, Selling the City, is based in New York City, whose urban environment contrasts sharply with the ocean vistas of its spinoffs in Tampa and Orange County.

Selling the City features concrete sidewalks, neon-orange pylons and exposed pipes in its B-roll. As a city dweller, the aesthetics feel relatable to me, and are less of a luxurious means of escape.

While I work out how and where I’ll be able to afford housing long-term in Toronto — or elsewhere if I have to — I suddenly can’t unsee the absurdity of it all.

In a time when four in 10 Canadians report being highly concerned about their ability to afford housing, it makes sense that people of my generation, gen Z, are attracted to media featuring people who are seemingly unconcerned about how much money they’ll make in the future because they have so much of it already.

Some of us are online shopaholics. More than half of us want to be influencers. By 2030, we will account for 30 per cent of the luxury market.

There’s nothing wrong with aspiring to be comfortable. But lately I feel stuck in a catch-22. Every form of escapism from my dystopian reality — endless bingeable content, online shopping, trying out the new, hyped-up wellness spa downtown — requires me to shut my eyes tight in order to not let in even a drop of the real world. When just outside, unhoused people are freezing in -20 C weather, using trendy ice baths and saunas requires an intentional dissonance.

The escape, it sometimes seems, has become part of the dystopia itself.

There are few escapist activities left for me that don’t force me to reckon with how much progress lies ahead for everyone in my city to feel warm, nourished, safe.

What happens when I give up the fantasy?

At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, Contagion, the 2011 thriller sci-fi about what happens to society when a global virus breaks out, was topping iTunes and Netflix charts.

Many of my friends expressed wanting nothing to do with a pandemic movie in that moment — why expose yourself to stress you already have in real life? But I found strange comfort in my first viewing of the movie. I wanted media that acknowledged my reality and didn’t make me feel more isolated than I already was.

“Why do I keep watching Contagion?” asked one YouTube video essayist. He went on to explain the phenomenon as an avenue for practising intense emotional states without living their real-life consequences.

“It works as a form of emotional inoculation. I am scared and anxious and uncertain, and so I will make myself more scared and more anxious and more uncertain because it’s still fiction. It’s still safe. It still has an end. It is bounded.”

It’s starting to feel like even my fantasies can’t keep up the fantasies. As the Selling Sunset team figures out how to cover the L.A. wildfires that killed at least 29 people and burned down thousands of homes in the city’s affluent neighbourhoods, filming Season 9 has been put on hold.

Bingeing Selling Sunset — or other favourite shows of mine like Love Island or Love Is Blind — brings me genuine joy. I laugh, I cry, I reflect on the shows’ social-anthropological elements and delight in petty updates over voice notes with my friends.

Still, in an age of content saturation, I find it challenging to navigate what a healthy dose of escapism is versus what harmful avoidance may be. And whether reality, however more painful, is a better, more grounding place to spend my free time.

Reality harshly demands we sit in the silence and listen to what our bodies have to say. But that only happens when we can tolerate it long enough.

One night in Montreal at 4 a.m., my friends and I were surprised to encounter a man who had snuck up on us in the park. He simply wanted to ask for a cigarette. But we got to talking, and he asked us if Toronto, where I’m from, has better supports for unhoused people.

We told him, in all honesty, Toronto is probably worse.

After such exchanges, I inevitably go home and, eventually, engage again in my usual cycle of escapism — including long sessions with reality TV built on the excesses of the rich.

Sometimes, in another sort of fantasy, I wonder what might happen if I didn’t.