Minimalism vs The Cloud

My stereo system (a turntable, two bookshelf speakers, an amplifier, and about 30 vinyl records) is a disgrace to my minimalism. I don’t need it and I don’t love it. But I do like it. As one school of minimalism would put it, it sparks joy.

I treat it as temporary. I might sell it one day, when it ceases to deliver the goods or when I need the money.

I keep wondering if I’d rather have the ullage (the empty space) instead of the stereo system. For now the answer remains: no, I’d prefer to have the records.

Part of the reason for this return to physical media was to buck against digital streaming and jab-screen devices. In many ways, I’m a 20th Century boy.

The bottom line, really, is that I don’t enjoy streamed music. Playing it has little appeal to me as an activity, so while the storage solution of The Cloud might look like a good one, it’s a failure in that the new system doesn’t actually deliver the benefits of the old one. Quitting something you enjoy without a higher goal (e.g. the plan is to move country) is no solution to anything.

I was going to write more fully about this today but, by happy coincidence, my friend Carrie just did the same. She speaks of the benefits of physical media:

It feels like [vinyl] somehow matters more, and because I’m listening with my whole self it’s much more emotionally affecting too.

[Streaming has] broken many artists’ ability to make a living from music. When you can stream pretty much everything ever recorded for less than you’d pay for a single vinyl LP, your streams are almost worthless in terms of what any artist gets paid.

and of the reservations about it:

vinyl is hilariously expensive and may need you to buy a whole bunch of new hardware too

The reasons not to buy a bunch of vinyl records remain the same as when I first put thought into this. It’s stuff. But as much as I dislike the cost and the responsibility of ownership, I also dislike the impoverished world offered by streaming.

The Cloud is a good place to stash your ugly, boring administrative documents. And it makes photographs more sharable and stops them from collecting dust. But music? Not everything needs to be invisibled away. I have real art on my walls too, not those horrible screens you can get now. And real books, not e-books. The physical world is better for you sometimes; to move around and manually make something happen is appealing to the primate brain. And we are primates.

I’m not saying every primal urge should be humoured or that everything should be analogue instead of digital but, overall, a balance can be struck in the interests of mental health and general quality of life.

I’d rather be with my partner “IRL” than look at her face on Zoom. I’d rather write notes with a pencil on paper than in an app. And I’d rather, for now, softly drop the needle into a shiny black groove instead of jab dumbly at yet another screen while wondering if I’m really hearing the proper version or if the streaming provider is punishing the artist I’m currently trying to admire, while simultaneously cursing the range of bluetooth. I mean, yawn.

I may of course feel differently about this some day. Perhaps when I next move to a different apartment.

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Minimalism

Correct!

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Minimalism 101

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This Thursday evening, at 7pm, I’ll be teaching a class in minimalism (or ‘living with less’) at Monastiraki in Montreal.

The event is part of Monastiraki’s “School PWYC” series in which people teach classes in whatever they’re enthusiastic about.

This class will explore the idea of living with very few material possessions. We’ll look at the reasons we might want to do this: to save money, to save the planet, to save our souls. We’ll discuss some hints and tips on how to live minimally, how to benefit from a minimalist hobby, and how to appreciate the bare necessities. We’ll celebrate some of the heroes of minimalism, from 19th-Century rebel printer William Morris to future-facing digital minimalists.

I also plan to sing The Galaxy Song and Bear Necessities with ukulele accompaniment. This is a first for me so come along and witness history being made.

Here’s the event page at Ye Olde Book of Faces.

I daresay I’ll have some copies of New Escapologist to sell, and I’ll be happy to hang out and chat after the event too. Come along if you’re in the area!

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Can’t get enough minimalism

A few people emailed us recently to declare a new-found enthusiasm for minimalism. Believe me when I say that if these particular individuals are excited about minimalism now, there’s hope for the whole world yet.

There often comes a point when a fringe activity becomes adopted by the mainstream; a point when a living practice is no longer seen as eccentric. Recycling is a good example. In the 80s, my family seemed fairly alone in separating our garbage into plastic, paper, glass, and organic waste. We weren’t exactly hippies, which suggests the tipping point was already on the horizon, but our activity was certainly seen as odd by our friends and neighbours. In the 90s, recycling became seen as a responsibility, but it was still fashionable to shirk it. Today, the infrastructure to support recycling is convenient and ubiquitous, and recycling has become a matter of civic pride. What do you mean you don’t recycle?

I think minimalism (or ‘Reduction’ if you remember the most rejected of ‘The Three Rs’) is in a similar place to where recycling was in the 90s: people are becoming aware of the advantages, to stop reacting so violently to the suggestion that they voluntarily curb their consumer privileges, and to appreciate the minimalist aesthetic. Tablet computing is already encouraging a post-materialist attitude in some areas of consumption, and cloud computing promotes a certain distance between you and your stuff.

I think we’re on the brink of a third wave in terms of our attitudes to stuff. The new cycle will concern itself with empty space and quietness as the new luxury goods. Why a third wave? Peak Oil: the idea that we’ve already reached the point in time when the global production of oil reached its maximum rate, after which total global production gradually declines. We have to get used to not being able to buy cheap, disposable, largely-plastic products. We have to get used to inaccessibility due to products not being so readily and cheaply shipped.

Technology will partway solve the problem. Oil can be replaced by renewable energy resources. But to really solve the problem, we have to adjust to a new relationship between humans and stuff. It’s not a greenie fantasy anymore, but a cold necessity. Out goes the cheap and disposable, in comes the expensive and durable. Out goes lots of pointless stuff, in comes maximum utility and beauty. Out goes the idea that high-tech will save everything, in comes the balance of Brave New and Brave Old Worlds.

Space and quiet will be the new luxury goods. You’ll see. Buy shares in the quiet industries.

Criticisms of minimalism

We often talk about minimalism at New Escapologist and our interest is three-fold:

– Environmental: by reducing your consumer habits, you have less impact on the natural environment.

– Financial: by consuming less, you don’t need to spend as much money. Consequentially you don’t need to work so hard at earning money.

– Aesthetic: by reducing physical possessions, you can have a cleaner, more manageable living or working space.

In our time talking about minimalism, we’ve encountered a few criticisms. Some of them are fair, some understandably verge on the hostile (understandable because minimalism asks people to curb their consumer freedom), and others are from people who’ve completely missed the point. In this post, I respond to some of the most common or most remarkable.

I have a guest post at a blog called Skool of Life. My piece responds to six real and fairly common criticisms of minimalism.

The post has also resulted in some reasonable comments, to which I am able to respond. In particular, a bloke called Andy worries that defining one’s self as a minimalist is as bad as defining yourself as a materialist. It gave me the opportunity to say this:

1. The desire to define yourself one way or another is a piece of psychological baggage a minimalist might want to jettison. Let’s not worry about defining ourselves. Self-expression is a nonsense championed by Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. It is little more than a marketing device that minimalists should proof themselves against.

2. Even if you choose to define yourself by owning a small number of things, your doing so is certainly better than defining yourself as someone who owns a large number of things. Your reluctance to consume will help the environment and help your wallet. So, while I’d advise against defining yourself in this way, it is still outwardly and empirically better than defining yourself as a materialist.

Enjoy the post! Please Tweet the link around if you can.

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On resistance, minimalism, workplace tedium and cottage industry

The only real difference between an Escapologist and someone who simply hates their job is that the Escapologist has begun to take deliberate measures toward actually changing things. I think most people who hate their job don’t realise that escape is an option.

From an arrogant interview I did for Andrew Williams at his new blog, Rainy Day Wonder.

117 Beds

Three years ago, I quit having a fixed place to live in, leaving my home for various locales across the UK and beyond. The notes in my phone reveal that, to date, I’ve slept in 117 beds, in locations ranging from the Scottish Highlands and coastal Dorset to Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, and the avant-garde Georgian capital of Tbilisi, all while holding down a full-time job.

I’d rather have no job and a single home base to be honest, but this is certainly a tempting way to live. Just think of the opportunity it would afford for adventure.

The writer Lydia Swinscoe has embraced minimalism and utterly challenged the Western ideals of permanence and security, ideals so ingrained that many people wouldn’t even think to question them. When the source of the modern malaise is so hard to put your finger on sometimes, why not question the big ones? The facts of life that are too big to see sometimes? Maybe living in one place instead of nomadically is where we’ve been going wrong.

In any event, she’s footloose and fancy-free: in London one minute and Tbilisi the next. Come on, that’s so cool.

Living nomadically, mostly out of a 65-litre backpack, I’ve become deeply aware of just how much “stuff” we collect but don’t need. Everywhere – on TV, online, pasted across billboards, on the sides of buses – we’re bombarded with materialistic messages luring us to buy the latest gadgets, kitchen appliances (read: air fryers), home furnishings, newest fashion trends and miracle beauty products. I’m convinced it’s a trap.

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Issue 16 (June) is now available to pre-order.

An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 75. Boat!

As part of my ongoing hostelling adventure, I slept on a boat!

We’re looking at existenzminimum again:

You get a private cabin (privacy being a plus in hostels) reminiscent of the cabin you get on a sleeper train or an overnight ferry.

Since the boat is on an Amsterdam canal rather than a life on the ocean waves, you feel no watery motion while sleeping at all.

But if you open a curtain in the dead of night… you might see a duck. 🦆

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There’s a little more about the minimalism of hostels in Issue 15.

Epub Blues

Some of our digital editions (in the epub format) don’t read very well on certain devices. Sigh.

You might have seen an error screen like the image above instead of a nice cover page. You might also get problems with some of the line breaks.

To this I say: Grr.

For much of our original run, people would ask after digital editions. For a long time I said “NO! There will be no digital edition under any circumstances! New Escapologist stands against screens and electronic gizmos.”

To which some people would say: “But what about minimalism?”

To which I would say: “I see what you mean but even minimalists own some books. Have our periodicals among your treasured possessions. Or pass them on once you’ve read them. Ebooks are the devil’s dinner.”

But then others would say: “For me it’s about access. I can’t read the printed page. I need to be able to zoom in on the text.”

To which I would mumble: “mm, okay, fair enough.”

I don’t want to exclude anyone from our blistering wit and wisdom. So I made our future editions and back issues available in PDF. For minimalism and for access.

But even then, some people said they wanted epub since this is apparently the best format for embiggening text and hopping between items in a table of contents. Honestly, Gutenberg didn’t have to contend with any of this.

This time around, in advance of Issue 14, I tried to get the epub format nailed down, despite not really understanding or liking or believing in it. This is why there are errors. I’m not entirely sure what to do now.

I’m tempted to offer PDF as the only digital format from now on. They work on every device so far as I know and they have the happy bonus of displaying the work as it’s supposed to look. A lot of thought goes into the design of the print editions, you know, and the epub format strips all of that thought and craft and beauty away.

On the other hand, I don’t know if PDF meets the accessibility requirements of most people who need it or if it can have the metadata useful to digital library platforms.

What do the digital media preferers among you think? Here’s a quick survey, open for the next month.

Stayin’ Alive

This is boring news but… we changed our business model. I want to explain why and, who knows, maybe some of you will be interested in this behind-the-scenes glimpse into an Escapological business practice.

In the old days of the magazine (Issues 1-13), we used a print-on-demand service to satisfy every single sale. Well, the first fifty or seventy copies were delivered to my flat and I’d personally ship those ones to subscribers. But after that, an order would come in for a single issue and I’d essentially forward that order to the printing service.

The main advantage of fulfilling orders this way was that I didn’t need to hold inventory. I was very mobile at the time, flitting between Glasgow and Montreal and also travelling a lot, so boxes of magazine stock would have been quite the encumbrance.

The main disadvantage, however, was that it didn’t make any money. The profit margin on a £6 issue was maybe £1.50. So if I sold, say, 200 copies, I’d “make” £300. This would usually go towards printing the next batch of subscriber copies. We always said “New Escapologist makes no money” and it was true.

This time around, I want to make a small amount of money from the magazine. For myself, that is, not for a company or anything. It’s very, very hard to make money from books or magazines and the effort I put into it all is stupendous. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it all, but I need about £6,000 of income a year to stay alive and it makes sense for that money to come from my bookish exertions and not from some stupid day job that would take time away from the core operation of book- and magazine-making.

So that’s my aim. To make the £6,000 (from New Escapologist and from my books) I need to stay alive. What a grubby little Capitalist I am, eh? In between my self-financed meals, I will be rolling in pence.

As such, the old print-on-demand model is no good. I need to print hundreds of copies in advance so that the cost-per-copy is about £2 and then sell them at £9 for a £7 profit. It might actually work, though of course it remains to be seen.

I expect to sell 300 copies of each issue. 300x£7 is £2,100. Twice per year is £4,200. The remaining £1,800 (and hopefully a little more) will come from sales of my books.

So there we go. That’s why we changed the business model (or maybe just the “printing model”) and why, eventually, issues from 14 onwards will eventually go out of print. Just like other magazines.

I don’t think I’ve ever spoken so candidly about money and how that works here at Escape Towers. But I wanted to be transparent for a moment, to show you where the money goes, to show you how it all works. I don’t get rich, I make just enough to live on. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Anything other than subsistence farming is, in my view, a waste of time.

Frugality and minimalism make things viable (and ethical) on the outgoings front, while these sort of exertions (writing, editing, printing, schlepping to the Post Office every couple of days) take care of the income. The rest of life involves recumbent positions.

Thanks to everyone who has supported New Escapologist‘s return and therefore my ability to carry on doing this. Here’s where to go if you’d like to subscribe or buy a single issue. There’s maybe 100 copies left!

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