Catfood Omelettes
This is from the introduction to a 1998 comic called Queen of the Black Black by Megan Kelso:
I plan to be drawing comics when I am an old, old, woman, barring early death or a freak accident. Maybe I’ll own a skating rink or maybe I’ll be living on catfood omelettes in a damp basement apartment, but I WILL be making comics.
Such gorgeous integrity. I really admire the the certainty, the commitment, the ability to look sacrifice in the whites of the eyes. An aspiring or struggling creative person could take strength from this today.
Kelso, needless to say, is still making comics.
When I searched around the quote this morning I found it in full, quoted back to her, in a 2011 interview. The interviewer asks if she still feels that way “now”. Kelso:
My young self made a vow that my older self feels obliged to keep. I sometimes wonder if that very public vow I made is part of what has kept me at it. However, I love making comics as much if not more than I did back then, so I think I would’ve kept at it even if I hadn’t proclaimed it from the hilltops the way I did. I fear I’m going to be more on the catfood side of things than the skating rink side, but yes, I still believe it.
You can take it from me as well. There may be twists and turns in the road, times you feel foolish or low, but commit (and accept the catfood omelette contingency) and you’ll succeed. You might not become mega-famous or super-rich (dubious prizes anyway) but you’ll still be doing your thing instead of something you despise. And that’s Escapology.
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A Humanistic Sickness
“About 70 percent of people,” says Dan Cable, “are not engaged in what they do all day long, and about eighteen percent of people are repulsed.”
18% is a lot of people.
Cable is the Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the London Business School. As such, he unsurprisingly frames this repulsion as bad for worker motivation and productivity, but he also describes it as “a humanistic sickness.”
He traces the root of the disengagement/repulsion problem to the beginning of the twentieth century:
Each of the people in [a shoe shop] would watch the customer walk in, and then they’d make a shoe for that customer [but a few years after the Industrial Revolution] we got this different idea, as a species, where we should not sell two pairs of shoes each day, but two million.
As we know (read my books!), this led to Taylorism: the separation of “head and hand” and the division of work into smaller (and increasingly meaningless) sub-tasks. One person stitches the sole of those shoes, another stitches the heel, another threads the laces, and so on. We became a Big Machine, workers became alienated from their work or to lose sight of bigger pictures, and our daily activities lost meaning to the point where 70% are not engaged and 18% (the most likely Escapologists among us) are “repulsed” by it. Well done, Capitalism.
As Cable explains in the video, this way of working isn’t good for the way our biological brains evolved. Humans need novelty, we need change, we need problems to solve. We also, I’d add, need to be able to take a sense of pride in our crafts and to enjoy the moment of finishing a meaningful task.
The relevant part of the brain, Cable says, is called the ventral striatum and it’s forever “urging us to explore the boundaries of what we know, urging us to be curious.”
This ventral striatum, especially here in the 21st century, will remain unsatisfied if we don’t escape into what, a few months ago, we called “the right kind of work.”
It may or may not involve making shoes.
How will you make that escape? Alternatively, how did you make that escape? Let me know. New Escapologist, in its return to print, will have space devoted to such stories. Tell them to us. Tell them to your community: the rest of the 18%.
Shopping is Good
Here at New Escapologist, we’ve always said that shopping and consumerism are forces for good. Or something like that anyway, I forget the details.
Sorry folks. This is just my naughty way of saying that the New Escapologist magazine shop is back in business.
You can now buy our first print edition in five years (shipping on August 10th) or subscribe to two or four brand new issues.
But that’s not all! The back issue bundles are still expensive because they’re print-on-demand, but there’s a PDF version of our complete archive (that’s Issues 1-13) for just £25. Imagine that! The whole original run of the magazine for your very own hard drive to enjoy. 90% of each PDF sale is profit and will help us to keep making wild new things.
There’s also a fiver off The Good Life for Wage Slaves using code WAGE5 while stocks last.
Thanks everyone. Here’s to a bold new era of shopkeeping.
