Letter to the Editor: Does the Answer Really Lie in More Work?
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Dear Rob,
During a recent delve into my journals, I was reminded that in 2010 we were engaged in some email correspondence about giving up shopping. I was in a wonderfully free period of life between graduating from University and starting anything else and was writing a blog about resisting consumerism.
Shortly after this I was offered a full time job [for a large charity]. Jobs in the charity sector, especially in campaigning organisations, are dangerous because they give the appearance of doing something worthwhile and politically radical while trapping you at a desk for 40 hours a week (or more, because when you’re making the world a better place it feels morally incorrect to stick to your contracted hours.)
Promotions and raises, instead of bringing forward my escape, enabled more tattoos, better coffee, tickets to see bands that other people had heard of too. I’ve always called myself an anti-capitalist but capitalism got its claws into me anyway. Punk is an aesthetic like any other, marketed to me on Instagram via adverts for purple hair dye and tattoo brightening cream.
As I enter the second half of my thirties, I find myself increasingly tired of it all. Working for a charity seems, at best, paternalistic — full of white middle-class people who think they know best about the lives of the less fortunate — and at worst complicit in a system of widening inequality and climate crisis by letting governments off the hook by providing services no longer sufficiently funded by the state.
Much better, I thought, to be fixing those inequalities at the root causes. So I ran as candidate in the [redacted] elections. The only party I could stomach joining was the Green Party, so I didn’t win, but I did well enough to be asked to stand as a local councilor. The amount of work that would entail makes my chest tighten in panic.
And I’m wondering, does the answer really lie in more work? Is the world going to be made better by all this hustle? By attending endless meetings in our spare time? By being so exhausted that we mindlessly consume terrible food and bad TV and the endless scroll of social media?
A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of The Way Home by Mark Boyle in a charity shop. Reading this, alongside the return of New Escapologist (and especially the piece about Henry Gibbs) has me thinking of escape again.
I’ve already stood down from one of the trustee boards I’m on, and started ignoring calls for volunteers on Whatsapp groups. I’ve stopped posting on social media. I’m even thinking of moving out of London and planting a veg garden.
K
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In Issue 17, we’re running an excerpt from After Work by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek. They make a distinction between freedom through work and freedom from work, which is an important one.
Your point about punk being an saleable aesthetic is a good one. There’s a book about this called The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath. When I interviewed him for Issue 9, he seemed to think this was all so obvious, that everyone can see through the claptrap. But is it? At that time I still believed in at least some of the punk aesthetic being symbollic of actual values, that someone with blue hair or some tats might be my tribe. Which is ironic really because in punk terms I look like a real square. But anyway, it’s a good point. Punk is for sale.
I hope you do what’s right for you, K. I won’t advise you to do anything because only you can know your full situation, but slowing down and operating far from the capital are things I’ve always put stock in and they seem to work for me. At least doing less (or just hanging out instead of working) doesn’t burn any fossil fuels. E.F. Schumacher wrote in Small is Beautiful (1973) that we should have done the work in the 1960s and 70s: used the finite “capital” or starter loan of fossil fuels to create sustainable alternatives. But we didn’t. Whatever happens now, I’m not sure that panicking about this failure is entirely productive.
What Do People Do All Day?
As you know, I am amused by Richard Scarry.
I like his style — it’s beautiful — but I’m skeptical of his idealistic obsession with manic and uneneding labour. It’s all in good fun but there’s also a sinister calvinism just beneath the surface. “Children are workers too” reads a page of his What Do People Do All Day?. Look into the eyes of that fireman cat and you’ll see the abyss.
Does “busyiness” necesarily need to be “work.” i.e. at one with the jobs the system? Perhaps that’s a question for another day.
Reader Andrew shares this short article with us. It’s a month old now because I’m a bum.
[As a child] I was terrified of being left alone, terrified of the dark, scared of UFOs and, perhaps most trickily, stricken by the existential panic of not knowing what to do with myself. It seemed to me entirely possible that at any time someone was going to take a look at me, realise I had no idea how I was going to spend my days and permanently send me to the naughty corner of life (ie, I’d end up an accountant).
For that reason, the title of [Richard] Scarry’s book was both a horrifyingly loaded question (“What do YOU do all day?”) and a soothing promise that if I read the tome, I would understand exactly how I was meant to spend my time.
The article is about the joy of “little jobs” — errands — as distinct from a career.
I’m not sure how practical it is to seek out little jobs as your main activity in life without also fretting about money all the time or becoming tied up in some sort of precariat scam administered by a Deliveroo-type company, but maybe I haven’t thought about it enough. There are probably ways. I’ve vouched for temping before. My friend Henry gets by with casual cash-in-hand gardening work.
The beauty of a little job is that it is disconnected from the culture of “career as self-worth and identity” that capitalism thrusts upon us. We are encouraged to think that our careers explain us totally – how often we get asked, “What do you do?” as though that will make us comprehensible to the world. But little jobs are not seen as tied to our souls in this way. […] A little job is healing; it allows us to divide the unbearable wash of our days into neat little segments, transforming our lives into oranges that we may peel and eat slice by slice.
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Coached
Tom Grundy recently interviewed me for his newsletter. Tom is a coach and New Escapologist columnist with a particular interest in personal development and working life. He’s also just a lovely chap who cares about the world. He escaped his own day job too.
Anyway, Tom asked me some great questions about the good life, consumerism, mental health, and the escape from work. Join Tom’s newsletter here if you’d like to to check out the interview. Part 1 begins on Tuesday.
Hawkeye
As a kid, I never liked M*A*S*H. That melancholy theme tune and the khaki-and-sand visuals switched me right off.
What a stupid kid!
I’m watching the show now, at last. I can’t believe (a) how good it is, (b) how much of it there is, and, (c) where Hawkeye has been all my life.
I think I’m a little bit in love with him. As well as actually finding him quite sexy, he’s a genius.
He spends most of his time in a dressing gown, just like I do, and he’s rigged up a gin still in his tent so he can enjoy off-duty martinis in the desert.
He seduces all the nurses. He’s a wisenheimer. He tweaks the nose of authority and stands against meanness.
In one episode, when asked about his dressing gown by a colonel, he says “well I tried sleeping in my uniform, but the medals kept sticking in me.”
And thats’ the thing. He has medals. He can be a slob because, like Sherlock Holmes, he’s lightyears ahead of anyone else. He’s a great wit, a happy drunk, and a lounge lizard – but he’s also an excellent surgeon, which is how he gets away with it all.
I love him. He’s the Bugs Bunny of the Korean War. Which doesn’t sound sexy, but somehow it is.
I love you, Hawkeye. My new idol. I’m sorry it took me so long to find you.
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Don’t Be Like Sitcom Man
There’s a BBC radio sitcom called There is No Escape:
a sitcom about a man dissatisfied with his life, whose feeble attempts to run away invariably end with him traipsing home defeated.
Sounds great!
Unfortunately it’s rubbish. Not only is it deeply unfunny, its overriding tone is “bicker.” Every moment seems to be two people nagging, belittling each other, acting according to immediate self-interest, making sarcastic remarks about previous sarcastic remarks. In four hours, there is no other tone.
I took GCSE drama at school and, before we learned anything, we’d sometimes default to this argumentative tone. This was probably because we were erroneously looking to create “drama” between two people instead of creating remarkable situations for them. Or maybe argument was just part of our difficult lives outside drama class so it was something we could easily reach for in the heat of the moment. Whatever the reason, an early lesson of GCSE drama was not to bicker, that there are other ways to exchange information (between actors and between actors and audience).
Even when I realised I was not going to enjoy There is No Escape, I thought I’d at least be able to tell you about some failed (fictional) escapes. Trouble is, he doesn’t really make any serious bids for escape at all. He does, however, have some character flaws which one imagines would hinder an escape. So let’s focus on those. Here’s how not to be like Sitcom Man.
Sitcom Man competes when he should cooperate. One episode has him struggling against a colleague for a promotion, despite the fact that promotion won’t solve his problems (he’ll still be employed by the market research company he despises). Escapologists shouldn’t compete in this way. Walk away from the dog-eat-dog workplace and use your calories and mindpower with others in service of something better. It’s not easy. But competing for promotion will not help you or anyone else.
Sitcom Man is lazy when it comes to finding solutions to his problems. His disappointment at a local shop’s failure to provide good food–“frozen turkey dinosaurs” being their typical fare–does not lead to the idea that he could set up a system by which he no longer depends on the hopeless shop simply because it is the nearest one. Growing his own veg, ordering a veg box, even just shopping online at shitting Tesco do not occur to him. That would require a modicum of imagination and a few minutes of application.
Sitcom Man hates when he should love. Actually, he doesn’t even seem to know what love is. Sitcom Man can’t get along with his girlfriend. To this I’d say: she’s not your girlfriend, Sitcom Man. You do not have a romantic relationship. If you have a perpetually oppositional stance against the person who lives with you and sees herself your partner, you’re failing them at the most fundamental level. In what way is this person your “girlfriend,” Sitcom Man? Explain yourself.
Sitcom Man falls back on old habits when he should be creative. It’s the old thinly-written sitcom problem of characters never learning, never trying anything twice. He complains and mopes and never accepts responsibility. Much like his writer who somehow never learned the basic lesson of allowing characters to speak without arguing, Sitcom Man fails to use the tools presumably available in his universe.
This sitcom is supposed to be about Sitcom Man’s escape attempts but he doesn’t try to make a break in any meaningful way; he just reacts pathetically to miserable events and ultimately accepts them. It’s a long way from Reginald Perrin, a far-older sitcom in which a middle-aged executive with a meaningless job and an unfulfilling family life realises he’s been robbed of his youth and takes exciting, eccentric action. While we’re making this comparison, I always got the feeling that any conservativism inate to Reggie Perrin was a situational product of its time; There is No Escape seems willfully conservative in its depiction of what it insists is an unalterable status-quo but really isn’t.
The satus-quo depicted in There is No Escape is one in which couples don’t like each other, jobs are to be endured, and turkey dinosaurs are YOUR DINNER, young man.
Or, you know, maybe it’s just supposed to be a pipe through which the funny is pumped into our patiently-waiting ears. They just forgot to run anything down it.
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New Escapologist Issue 17 is now available to pre-order! There IS escape.
Klaus und Erika
They literally had to run for their lives, but they did it in great style.
Any slob can read the PDF but I finally got my hands on the real McCoy.
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Speaking of the real McCoy, grab yourself some real print for your real eyeballs in our unreal shop.
Kick This Place
Hey look, it’s a workplace woe:
I’m a pawn, a worm, and a fart.
To the people who pay my paycheck, I’m a scheduled layoff.
They’ve slow-fired my coworker, who is now stuck in semi-hired limbo. It’s as confusing as it sounds. They still expect him to do a good job too.
I hope he finds a new job soon so he can kick this place.
From a nice post on the fast web.
1999: The Year of the Cubicle Movie
[Unlike] monster movies showing cold war anxieties and 21st-century horror movies conveying fears of acts of terror, [the films of 1999] were not about surviving the present, because the present was actually going well. They were about being tired of that stable present and looking for a radically different future.
Maybe. Maybe-maybe. For me it was more about being told to sit down and shut up after three years of reading Foucault in a university library and having the youthful desire, no the need, to strike out into art and tear the world to pieces. And not being allowed to. For reasons I’m still not completely clear on.
He’s right to note that The Matrix, Office Space, Fight Club, American Beauty, and Being John Malkovich were all released in 1999 and all feature “a main character tired of the stability, monotony, and uneventfulness of their [lives].”
That uneventfulness, to me, didn’t come from “the present going well,” by which he means culturally and economically at a macro level, but from the first cracks appearing in the old doxa that “people go to work and that’s that” and the widespread failure to understand the opportunities presented by the internet.
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Letter to the Editor: Stuff for Your Stuff
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Friend Paula writes:
Your mention of the egg poaching cups and of excess production reminded me of a thought I had recently: one signal that you are consuming too much is when you start buying stuff for your stuff.
A tea cozy for your kettle or socks for your golf clubs or a fluffy cover for your toilet lid (yes, these exist). Even buying storage stuff for your stuff can lead to realizing you have some space to fill and buying more stuff.
With our tiny house we have optimized space to the point that if we optimize or organize any further we will suddenly have storage space available. And nothing good ever happens in that situation.
In defence of our tiny house, we built it with the intention that it would outlive us and with the notion that we would be able to hold and protect the forest on our property (about five acres worth, plus a protected wetland) until we are gone. We took only as much clearing as we needed to build the house and are preserving the rest.
We do miss the access aspect of city living sometimes. But there are compensations in the form of endless forest baths and peace and quiet (of the forest variety, which is not really silent at all – at least not all the time.)
Cheers,
P
