About
I built this for people like me.
My name is Sam — a writing name I use everywhere this app exists. I'm not going to tell you my real name, because the whole point of Escape is that what happens inside your head doesn't have to be public. That privacy contract starts with me.
I built Escape alone. One person designing, writing, and shipping, full-time — eight hours a day, including weekends. I've been working on it for about a year. I'm going all in.
Why I built it
I had this for decades. Not the worst version, but the kind that sits in the background and quietly eats at things — focus, motivation, pieces of relationships. I relapsed many times. I tried the stuff that was supposed to work, and most of it didn't. The apps that yelled at me. The ones that ranked me on a leaderboard. The ones that turned recovery into a video game where the streak was the only score.
I watched friends go through it too. The single ones. The married ones. The ones in serious relationships. It wasn't one type of person — it was all of them. Quietly, alone, not talking about it.
And then sexualized content kept getting more everywhere — not just on the sites people went to find it, but on the social-media feeds of everyone. The line between "porn" and "what the algorithm serves you" kept blurring.
I started building Escape before this gets worse. Synthetic content is about to take the next step — personalized images, personalized videos, made on demand from whatever a model is told to make. The version of this problem we have today is the easy version. I wanted something honest in the world before the harder version arrives.
Where I am now
I'm mostly on the other side. Not finished — I still deal with it sometimes — but nowhere near where I used to be. The apps and websites I used along the way are part of why. I wanted to make something that paid that forward. I'm going to tell you what I would have wanted someone to tell me when I started.
The voice is plain because that's what I needed at 11pm on a Tuesday, alone with the phone. Nothing motivational-poster, nothing performative, nothing that asks you to perform masculinity at us.
If you want to say something
Write to [email protected]. I read every email. I usually take a few days.