What Would I Do if I Didn’t Go to Work?
What would I do if I didn’t go to work?
It’s a good question, a frequently-asked one even. It’s asked sarcastically by dullards and sincerely by those of us with imaginations.
In a way, the question is at the heart of Escapology. Where are you going today? What would you like to do with yourself? How would you like to apply your imagination and willpower if given a chance?
I’d like to dedicate a sub-chapter of the forthcoming Escape Everything! book to answering this question through examples.
If you’d like to be mentioned in the book (even if anonymously), drop me an email with a brief description of how you spend your time instead of going to work (or how you imagine you’d spend it if you didn’t go to work).
There are many ways of spending days, so let’s show the world a few!
Mind the Gap
Thanks to friend Nicola for telling us about these brilliant subway hacks.
Yesterday, activists pasted quotations from Dave Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs essay over existing adverts on the London tube.
They did this specifically yesterday because Monday 5th is the first day back to work after Christmas for many Londoners, and tube commuters are probably the ones who will benefit most from a dose of Graeber wisdom and mischief.
Among the quotations used are:
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working.
Huge swaths of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.
and
How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?
Ugly, idiotic Vice magazine has an opportunistic interview with Graeber about the posters in which he rises to the occasion to say:
over the course of the 20th century there’s been a huge effort to re-imagine the world; it’s the imagination of these great entrepreneurial geniuses that create all these things—workers are just robots, working in the factories, doing what they’re told, extensions of the minds of these quite great people. It seems there has been an increased emphasis on work as of pure value unto itself.
and:
A job that isn’t bullshit should have concrete benefits to other people. But we can’t do jobs that aren’t bullshit because of debt. That’s a great dilemma from which that movement actually started I think. I would say to unions and organizers, think about that, redefine what is valuable about work—work is valuable if it makes other people’s lives better. It would be nice if we were rewarded for making people’s lives better, not punished. From an individual point of view, think about the way that you can navigate that with your own conscience.
All of this happened while I was sleeping.
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An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 39. 2014 Review.
Baboosh! Here it is. My traditionally-belated End-Of-Year Report to My Imaginary Shareholders.
The point of this Diary series more generally is to help answer the question, “what would I do if I didn’t have a job?” This, madam. This is what. Or at least, it’s one example. So here we go.
Tardigrades Down Under
Reader Dean confirms safe receipt of his copy of Issue Eleven in sunny Tasmania.
As Dean is our farthest-flung reader, it’s probably safe to say that everyone else’s copy will have been received already.
Happy New Year to every one of our readers, all over the world. x
★ Tired of the everyday grind? Pre-order the New Escapologist book today.
