Inner Weirdo
I’d been looking forward to reading a book called Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World. Life is too crowded, too busy, too loud. And I wondered if the book might contain some solutions for Escapologists.
In the end, I didn’t enjoy the book at all. It barely feels like a real book; almost like one of those prop books you might see in Ikea to make a bookcase look nice on the display.
The biggest problem is the author’s fixation on technology. He deploys it usefully enough in the first couple of chapters to illustrate the problem of the crowded world through tech-enabled connectedness, which is fine as it goes, though even at that early stage I was thinking “but that’s only one of the problems, what else have you got?”
He returns to it time and time again, boringly explaining the basics of Twitter Analytics, emoji, and Rotten Tomatoes as if we’d never heard of them. I assumed the book must be old, perhaps from 2006, but the copyright page shows a publication date of 2017. It’s very odd.
I cheered up a bit when Quentin Crisp made an appearance in Chapter 5. The author seems to find Crisp’s wit and defiance personally important and some of his passion is on the page. But then we’re back to moaning about the Internet after four short pages of circling some rather basic ideas about conformity and individualism.
Anyway, there is the occasional nugget of something. For example, I like this moment, which is buried in the middle of the book at the end of a boring digression about whether “smart” thermostats can have beliefs and tastes (they can’t: it’s just anthropomorphism, though the author never says this):
today we need to safeguard our inner weirdo, seal it off and protect it from being buffeted. Learn an old torch song that nobody knows; read a musty, out-of-print detective novel; photograph a honey-perfect sunset and show it to no one. We may need to build new and stronger weirdo cocoons, in which to entertain our private selves. Beyond the sharing, the commenting, the constant thumbs-upping, beyond all that distracting gilt, there are stranger things waiting to be loved.
(I didn’t know what an “old torch song” was; I thought maybe the author was into a defunct indie rock band called Torch whose name should be styled with a lower-case “t”, but apparently it’s a genre of love song. Cool.)
I agree with what he’s saying here but only up to a point. Escapologists should avoid the strong force of common opinion by way of protecting our minds and nurturing our own insights. Reading books or watching films properly or restfully playing the violin instead of gawping at the television, for example, is indeed something we’ve talked about before.
It’s better for you (because who wants to be a zombie, merely reacting to whatever comes along?) and better for the world (because society needs individual thinkers and contrariains and, if nothing else, a control group). But we don’t need to “safeguard our inner weirdo” for its own sake exactly. Instead, courting internal uniqueness happens naturally, emerging almost as a by-product of our bigger projects.
When you’re working on an escape plan to say goodbye to the office or if you’re trying to build the creative muscles to write your first novel, the inner weirdo will thrive of its own volition.
Don’t worry about the claptrap of the digital or workaday worlds. Just ignore them and do your own beautiful thing.
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About Robert Wringham
Robert Wringham is the editor of New Escapologist. He also writes books and articles. Read more at wringham.co.uk