I think escaping one's mind is a critical part of being human. As important an appetite as anything else, such as sleeping, eating ,sex etc. But it's the one thing that's denied to us. Unless it's alcohol. We live in these super-tribes now, that we at least partially need to "fit-in" and adhere to the code. These super-tribes are the tenuous links we have with others in society and the mundane routine we must follow if we are to be a part of it. It includes the fake gods we have too, i.e. The brands that fill your fridge, our omnipresent overlord and confidant Google, our benevolent-provider-of-everything Amazon, ETC. The downside is, the current structure of society means we can't (on the surface) behave in a way that is anywhere close to our normal selves. That leads to massive dissonance while we carry this weird second personality. Scale that up across millions of people and you have a permanent undercurrent of frustration, anger and all-round craziness that is just desperate to channel itself.

Long-story short, we're stuffed into these routines that, paradoxically, most of us need to survive. The ONLY outlet, is to get out of our minds once in a while in one way or another. I see a guy on the beach every morning who sings weird opera music to himself that can be heard from a few hundred metres away. He paces up and down for a half hour belting his lungs out and goes home. It's perfectly normal to most the people that've seen him a few times but to strangers or tourists he looks like a crazy guy. Yet a good number of those same strangers would pay $100 to go and watch the same type of guy in an auditorium . That's total insanity to me.