How to Avoid Work (or: Why Don’t You Do It?)
We discovered a 1949 book called How To Avoid Work when my girlfriend found a postcard reproduction of its dust cover for sale in the British Library gift shop. The book is out of print and usually costs a fortune but we were lucky enough to find a copy on Etsy for a tenner.
The book is terse, austere, and thanks to the passage of time, somewhat quaint. It’s basically a career guidance book with the central message that “work” can be avoided if we think carefully about the kind of job we really want. It’s a bit of a rip-off in that you’ll still have a career and a daily job if you follow this advice, but there’s wisdom in the notion that we don’t have to do work that contradicts our values or wastes our true talents.
Much of the book is too old-fashioned to still be applicable: there’s a funny chapter about ‘sponsorship’ – a method of landing a corporate job by means of informal schmoozing. There’s also an old-fashioned and hectoring lingo, and a strong assumption that the career-minded reader has external genitalia.
But there’s one interesting chapter called “Why don’t you do it?” which is ostensibly about New Escapologist‘s favourite subject: Bad Faith. It asks why so many people do things they don’t want to do (and fail to do the things they truly want to do). Here’s a little sample. You’ll probably agree that it still holds water.
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I like … and can relate to lots .. and now I do have the time and the money
The paragraph about the housewife not following her hobby is all to very real even today ….
Some old things can still make sense
Over this past winter I read Thoreau’s Walden. Similar to the book in this blog posting, Thoreau bangs on about people wasting time, pursing money in the hope it will create time to do what they aren’t and people generally not really doing what they want for a load of invented reasons. I was truly astounded at how this mid-19th centry book was so astute in its observations and how relevant they are to today. If you haven’t read it, go find a copy.
I love this. It challenges the nostalgic notion that everyone in the 1940′s-50′s looked at work and education differently than we do today. It is sad that so many people plod along through the muck when there’s a nice path we could be taking, instead, if only we have the small bit of courage to take it and see where it leads.
Walden is great. He was properly bonkers – a transcendentalist and everything – but his account of his time at the pond is smashing and some of the ideas in it did help inspire New Escapologist.
This is the thing. We’re discouraged from certain careers. In Britain, it’s often class-oriented. “No son o’ mine’s gonna be a hairdresser!” But sometimes it’s with the best intentions. One might think that becoming a musician will be a risky course of action compared to becoming a plumber – but if you commit your whole life doing something you have no love for then you’ve already lost.