3 Reasons to Never Take Another Job
This is from a very good essay by entrepreneur Corbett Barr in which he explains succinctly why self-employment beats the hell out of working for someone else.
These aren’t feudal times. If you live in the free world, there is no reason you have to work for someone else. The freedom to pursue happiness and live the life you desire is the greatest gift of modern society, yet most of us piss that opportunity away.
When you work a job, someone else is ultimately in control of what you work on, what youâre responsible for, when you work, when you take time off and how much you earn.
If you absolutely love your job, perhaps giving up that amount of control is worth it. For most people, it seems insane to accept those conditions.
Help fund the forthcoming Escapology book. Pre-order a copy today.
Sorry — The Sun is Shining so I’ve Gone to Sleep on a Hill
You can escape — if only for one night — and find nature, wilderness, a bit of peace and then go back to your normal life with a slightly shifted perspective.
This is travel writer Alastair Humphries on his idea of the “microadventure”.
The idea is that life-enhancing travel need not require huge tracts of time or planning; that you can in fact sleep beneath the stars on weekends and be ready for work again on Monday.
Naturally, at New Escapologist we prefer a more full-time adventure, but taking the opportunity to enrich your life in this small and manageable way is fairly irresistible no matter what your daily experience looks like.
Besides, you can always enjoy a microadventure without being a slave to the weekend. Look at Alastair’s out-of-office message:
Sorry — the sun is shining so I’ve gone to sleep on a hill.
Help fund the forthcoming Escapology book. Pre-order a copy today.
Park It In, Man
Imagine how beautiful our cities would be with no cars in them. The clean air. The safe streets. The polite sounds of conversation and twittering birds instead of the roar of traffic.
Imagine the convenience and cost efficiency of teeny little downtown houses instead of big ones further out of town. No commutes. No massive mortgages or heating bills. Proximity to all the cool bars, cinemas, universities, libraries and shops.
Possible solution? Replace parking spaces with neat minimalist homes.
Just try not to think about the idea of metered housing.
Help fund the forthcoming Escapology book and pre-order a copy today.
On Marketing
I’ve been doing my best to promote the New Escapologist book.
Marketing always makes me feel uncomfortable, partly for ethical reasons but mainly because I’d rather be doing something else, like reading P.G. Woodhouse books in my gently-rocking my hammock. That’s what summer is for.
Whatever the reason, even just politely inviting people to buy my stuff or asking them to tell others about it really takes something out of me. I largely enjoy tabling at book fairs, for instance, proudly representing New Escapologist and signing copies for friendly people. But even this level of promotion inevitably leaves me exhausted and spending the whole of the following week in a vegetative, convalescent state.
This puts me in mind of an article I wrote last year for a marketing blog. I met the nice lady who runs the blog at (of all places) the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair. I think she was looking for someone who wasn’t a natural marketeer but somehow muddled through.
I said I’d do it. No cash offered, of course, but I thought I’d win some of their readers over and make a few naughty jokes about marketing people (most of which, to their credit, made the edit).
In the piece, I express my aversion to marketing, explain how we sell New Escapologist, and also re-tell the magazine’s origin story. Here it is:
We’re Escapologists
Escape is thrilling: the wind rushing through your hair as you scarper as quickly as possible, resisting the temptation to look back to see if they’ve found your note yet.
It can be an unbeatable high. But it can also be the most reasonable, economical and practical course of action.
Not that you’d necessarily know it. We’re not generally encouraged to see commitments to things like work or shopping as the traps they are and as such escapable. British culture instead promotes endurance, to grin and bear it no matter how bored or miserable you are. American culture encourages fight over flight, to go down with all guns blazing.
There aren’t enough people saying “Sod this. I’m getting out of here. Pass me the good tunnelling spoon.”
Those who give up and walk out are too often considered cowardly, uncommitted or, oh dear, “a quitter”. The pupil escaping double maths by playing truant is punished. Those who escape the workforce are considered lazy or wasted or eccentric. Emigrants are viewed with suspicion, though their only crime was to stray from the landmass they happened to be born on.
This is all rather silly. We should respect people who take action by quitting the jobs they hate, leaving the partners they no longer love, fleeing the cities they find depressing, and abandoning traditions in which they find no value.
The will to flee was once considered a mental illness. Drapetomania was the apparent madness responsible for a plantation slave wanting to escape his captors. An American physician called Samuel A. Cartwright named the condition and explained that it could be seen where a slave became “sulky and dissatisfied without cause” and could be prevented by “whipping the devil out of them”.
In his eyes, being forced into backbreaking unpaid servitude was not considered adequate cause for “dissatisfaction”.
The Nazis were anti-escape too. Those who attempted (or were thought to be plotting) escape from concentration camps were branded with a Fluchtverdächtiger badge in addition to the badge representing whatever crime against Fascism had originally brought them to the camp. Not only was it awful to be born Jewish or gay or simply workshy, it was equally contemptible to want to escape being worked to death or gassed.
Today, a CV overflowing with short-term or dissimilar jobs is seen as unprofessional or belonging to an unfocused, undisciplined individual rather than, as the case may be, someone who is sporting or widely-experienced. Frankly, a CV professing no deviation from a single career plan can only belong to a liar or a twat but employers don’t often seem to notice this.
Slave owners, Nazis and HR Managers. Those are the kinds of people who oppose escape.
Against the grain, some of us are happy to walk out on a displeasing situation. We’re Escapologists.
We Offer You Escape!
A clipping from the first promotional email sent out by the publisher.
That tagline, by the way (“Ladies and gentlemen, we offer you escape!”) comes from a 1950s adventure radio series called Escape. I’ll tell you a little more about that some time.
Please consider backing the book if you’ve not already (and many thanks to everyone who has helped us get to 20% after just two days).
Should we make it, it’ll be a beautifully-designed book and a definitive and witty guide to Escapology and the good life. Help fund the project today.
