Escapism, Grief, & League of Legends
In the middle of grief, the most ordinary rituals become lifelines. For me, it’s been a nightly queue with the same friends I’ve played with for years.
I buried my mom last week. And in a few days, I’ll probably have to bury my dog too. Life has a way of stacking grief on top of grief, like there’s a queue system for tragedy and everything decided to lock in at once.
In times like these, you’d assume I’d shut down and disappear into work or responsibilities - and I almost did. But every night, around the same hour as always, I still log into League with the same group of friends I’ve been playing with for nearly a decade.
For a lot of people, League is “that stressful game that ruins your mood.” For me, it’s been the opposite - not because the game is peaceful, but because it asks nothing of my real life. It’s one of the few things in my day that isn’t tied to any success metric. I can try hard, I can be competitive, but none of it affects my income, my goals, or the chaos life throws at me. It’s effort without consequence, and that’s become rare.
We play the same modes at the same time every night, in the same voice chat, talking about the same nonsense we’ve joked about for years. These guys have seen me through breakups, career pivots, personal crises - hell, some of them showed up at my mother’s funeral. They’re the kind of friends who can argue about politics one minute, talk about philosophy the next, and still spend the rest of the game making the dumbest jokes imaginable. Sometimes we talk about life while we play; sometimes the whole point is not talking about life. Both versions feel necessary.
I don’t think League maps perfectly onto death or grief - there’s no poetic metaphor there. But it does teach you things about falling apart. You can spend 40 minutes losing horribly, feeling like absolutely nothing is going your way, and still find one angle, one fight, one decision that flips the outcome entirely. Sometimes the game encourages a kind of stubbornness that grief also demands: just one more game, it can’t be worse than the last.
Losing my mom and preparing to lose my dog has made the game matter more than it probably should. I’ve realized I spend most of my life optimizing for achievement - business, projects, goals, physical health. I rarely do things just because they feel good. League has become my reminder that you’re allowed to enjoy things that don’t “improve” you. You’re allowed to prioritize fun, especially when everything else feels impossibly heavy.
Escapism gets a bad reputation. And sure, too much of it can turn destructive. But if the only way you cope with loss is by burying yourself in work, productivity, or physical fitness, grief will devour you from the inside out. Sometimes you need to step into a space where nothing matters, where failure is meaningless, where you can sit with the people you love and just exist.
For me, that space happens to be a MOBA with bad matchmaking and players who type too much.
And right now, that’s enough.
