What is freedom? Is escaping still possible at all?
You have to escape from an escape room, everyone knows that. But do we still know what real freedom means?
At DarkPark we have a WhatsApp group for the staff where we can share all sorts of things about the escape rooms. Very handy!
For years now, there has been one member of our team without a smartphone. A young woman who chooses to simply carry an old-fashioned Nokia, to make calls and nothing else. So she isn't in our WhatsApp group either, and that can be pretty inconvenient at times, but deep down I'm secretly jealous of her. She has the courage not to get swept along in the rapids that we, as humanity, have unknowingly let ourselves be captured by. She has no WhatsApp, no social media, no NU.nl, no Netflix, no email and no addictive games on her phone. She can make calls, and that's enough.
The illusion of connection
When I was young, my mother taught me it was important to follow the news. "We do need to know a little about what's going on in the world." Maybe that was true back then, when there were only newspapers and a news bulletin of 10 minutes at most every hour. But these days the news is everywhere. You can't get around it anymore. I sometimes wonder whether it's healthy to be confronted with all the misery in the world at every moment of the day. I notice in myself, at least, that a kind of gloom settles in my head after just a few minutes of scrolling through news sites or social media.
My dream
I've always been a dreamer, and if you're going to dream anyway, dream big! Maybe one day I really will open that theme park I've been fantasizing about my whole life, or maybe one day I'll discover that it's precisely letting go of certain things that brings the feeling of freedom and happiness I'm looking for (and I think everyone is). That's a form of dreaming big too.
I have big dreams for DarkPark as well. Escape rooms that bring about real transformation, where you walk in as someone else and walk out as yourself. I want to go further than an hour of forgetting the worries of your daily life. I want to help you discover your own strength. The way a good book can give you an insight that suddenly sends your whole life in a new direction, or a film, a good conversation or a beautiful piece of music can touch you deep in your soul, so that you suddenly see everything in a different light. That's what I try to do with the escape rooms I design at DarkPark, and I can tell you it's not an easy journey, but when I see what it means to some people, it's worth all the pain, frustration and setbacks and more!
The wall
Pain, frustration and setbacks? Yes, unfortunately that comes with the territory when you try to bring about real change. Not everyone is ready to take on the battle with themselves. Many people have built a wall around themselves that they feel safe behind. The tragedy is that it's precisely that wall that keeps them from being truly happy. Without knowing it, they live like a kind of zombie in a world that doesn't help them process the pain, but only helps lay more bricks in the wall. Social media, advertising, online hate and negative news reports about a world racing ever faster toward the abyss. It has become almost impossible, really, to be just plain happy. No wonder so many people have decided to stay safely behind their wall.
Life is an escape room
And then suddenly some guy comes along trying to tear that wall down, when all you wanted was to come and play a nice little escape room. Great, thanks.
But if you're going to dream, dream big! So against my better judgment, I keep trying to show people that the fake reality they've built for themselves isn't actually real life. I lovingly help tear that wall down, brick by brick, but sometimes that comes with pain and fear, and not everyone dares to face that. Then I sometimes get criticism or bad reviews, but that doesn't stop me from continuing to build new things. To help people discover a new piece of themselves. To simply be happy again.
How beautiful would that be? If we were all just content and happy! No hate, no envy, no blame and jealousy. Just being happy, together.
The devil in your pocket
And so we come back to that phone. The simple Nokia of my loyal team member and the supersonic iPhone I carry around myself. The iPhone that gives me access to the whole world and should be the gateway to a rich and full life, but has quietly let the devil into my life.
I build my escape rooms with blood, sweat and tears to make other people's lives a little more beautiful (against my better judgment), and all the while I carry a device around with me that keeps me from giving it my all, that does his (or her, no idea whether my iPhone is a boy or a girl) utmost to slow me down, to distract me from what matters, to make me (deeply) unhappy.
I too am too cowardly to simply get rid of the thing. To choose happiness, to choose freedom.
The first escape attempt
A few months ago I took a first small step. I deleted the mail app from my iPhone. I didn't give myself time to think about it, because then I would have talked myself out of it, so I just did it. Bam. App gone. I was terrified that I'd no longer be reachable. That I'd no longer have 24-hour access to everything anyone wanted to throw at me. That the world would carry on without me.
But that didn't happen. Life simply went on. Of course I still had email on my laptop, but at least I didn't have that with me all day.
Pushing on
After this successful experiment, I decided to go a step further and leave every WhatsApp group I was in. Every single one. Only one-on-one conversations from now on, and no more groups where the most irrelevant things were shared all day long. No more cat videos, no more soccer moms who disagreed with how the new teams had been divided up, no more lame, supposedly funny replies to replies to replies. Peace. This turned out to be a bigger step than deleting the email app. Suddenly I was no longer in the loop on everything, no longer invited along on group outings, but what it gave me in return was worth far more!
Everything was better in the old days
Sometimes I wonder how on earth people got through the day in the era before the smartphone was invented. What did those people do all day? Wasn't life mind-numbingly boring back then?
Well, no, actually. People played games, had conversations, wrote each other letters, read books, put on some music and sat down in a chair to listen to it with their full attention, went for a walk and got an ice cream in town, let their minds wander and so gave their brains a rest, made love without constantly being distracted by that beeping thing on their nightstand.
Everything was better in the old days. Well… in this case, maybe it was.
The last enemy
So for a while I walked through life without email and WhatsApp groups in my pocket, and I liked it just fine. But still, that thing had too much power over me. While building an escape room, you sometimes have to wait for a moment. At those moments I noticed my attention going straight to my right pocket. That my right hand, as if attached by an elastic band, was automatically pulled in that direction to grab that little black box, just to fill that one minute, and before I knew it an hour had passed and I'd been standing there scrolling like a zombie. A whole hour gone, and what had I done? No idea, the hour had simply vanished. Learned nothing, created nothing, contributed nothing to this world, just mindlessly scrolled through the misery, or the supposedly perfect lives, of other people.
More drastic action was needed to take back control of my life for good. Willpower alone wasn't enough; that little box was too clever, knew all too well how to tempt me. I had to silence it.
Eliminating the temptation
I started with the games. The absence of email and WhatsApp groups had left a void, and my little black box had tempted me to fill that gap with puzzle games. After all, those overlapped with escape rooms, so they weren't as bad. WRONG! Just as bad! Just as addictive. They had to go, so I did it. There were a lot of them, so it took all my willpower to wring their little digital necks one by one while they looked at me with their pleading square eyes, but I pushed through.
Nothing changed. I haven't missed them for a moment. Unbelievable. Calm settled in my head. The elastic between my right hand and my pocket went slack, but there was still one big enemy to defeat. TikTok!
The final boss
“Deleting TikTok can't be that hard, can it?” I hear you say. “What were you even doing on TikTok?” It may surprise you, but TikTok is more than silly dances, cat videos, people falling over, life hacks that don't work and pranks that aren't funny. I followed a monk in an orange robe who sat in a Thai temple saying nothing, but when he did say something, it was pretty wise. I followed entrepreneurs who had achieved what I want to achieve and were happy to share their secrets, without you having to buy their online program first. I followed wise women who asked the same questions I did but had already found answers (probably because they had a Nokia instead of an iPhone). My timeline was constructed to make me a wiser person, but strangely enough, that didn't happen.
So TikTok had to go. Was I really going to do this? Fuck it, yes, just do it! And I did.
Focus and freedom
That was at the start of my vacation, a week ago now. In that week I've read two books. On previous vacations I always took 3 or so books and even more good intentions with me, but I had never once managed to actually read them. Those books always came back home unopened, and my iPhone grinned. Now I'd suddenly read two books!
This story doesn't have an ending yet. I don't know how it goes on from here. The last enemy in my path is Instagram, but I use that app to talk with the fans of our escape rooms. One day I hope to find a solution for that too. The calm in my head, in any case, is wonderful. This must be how people felt before there were smartphones. I have focus and it feels like I can move mountains. Maybe I'll go and play an escape room again soon; it's been far too long. Bring on real life.
Hello world!
