Half-Price Book Sale This Week
The publisher recently surprised me with some extra stock and I don’t really have space to store it comfortably. What better excuse for a half-price sale?
Use coupon code GOOD50 for a 50% discount on The Good Life for Wage Slaves and/or OUT50 for a 50% discount on I’m Out.
Naturally, you still have to pay shipping, but this is still the best deal I’ve ever been able to offer on either title. And to be fair to the cyborgs among you, the deal also works for the digital versions (here and here).
The offer runs for one week only, so go, go, go!
Stop, Thief!
A random thought about ownership in relation to minimalism.
Once, when I was working a short-term contract, I found a funny coconut monkey (you know the sort of thing) in a dusty storage box. It looked like the souvenir of a Wage Slave’s holiday, brought back from Hawaii for ambivalent co-workers.
The monkey was so grotesque and kitschy that I almost took it home, but then I realised that this would in fact be stealing so I left it in the box.
Most people wouldn’t even have thought of taking it, would they?
A similar thing happened a decade earlier. Just before leaving for a long spell in Canada, I found a novelty coffee mug in the back of a girlfriend’s kitchen cupboard. It said on it: “you can take the girl out of Glasgow, but you can’t take the Glasgow out of the girl.” Well, this would be the perfect talisman to take to Montreal! “Could I have this?” I asked. “No,” she said, bewildered that I’d just ask to take something from her house.
I think this weird (occasional!) willingness to just take something that isn’t mine comes from years of minimalism because:
1. I’ve honed a pseudo-spiritual belief that ownership is a relatively empty concept. It’s rarely more than a case of displacement: a thing is “here” instead of “there.” Big deal.
2. The idea of things not being “in circulation” frustrates me. I don’t want anything to be neglected or out of service. It would be better to have X valued objects in the world, all moving around and everyone having a turn with them, than 1000X objects in the world, all locked away in boxes.
My literally criminal urge to “take” is probably the flipside of the more widely documented minimalist urge to give things away. When I’m done with something, I return it to the world by taking it to a charity shop, by listing it on eBay, or by leaving it on the street with a “please take” sign.
Or maybe I’m just a secret klepto.
You never really own anything. Either it breaks and becomes garbage, which you then surrender, or you die and someone else inherits it or throws it away.
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Sleeping Coffins
My partner and I were talking to a friend recently about international travel and how the cost of accommodation is, for what you get, quite a lot. All an Escapologist wants is a clean bed plus a door with a lock on it, yet even at the affordable end of the scale you have to pay €40-90 per night. It becomes the main expense of travel, even though sleep isn’t exactly what you’re travelling for.
We discussed the prospect of (we couldn’t think of another name at the time) a “sleeping coffin.” They’d be immovable coffin-like boxes, lockable from the inside, and purchasable for €7 by contactless debit card. They’d be scattered around city streets like e-scooters and locatable via an app.
My partner said it was the worst thing she’d ever heard me say. She’s probably right.
But wait! Lets think again. With sleeping coffins, you’d be completely mobile, freer even than a snail or tortoise. You’d just turn up to a city, zero planning, confident of a secure place to sleep for barely any money. Maybe you’d bring an inflatable pillow or something, and climb into a coffin when you run out of steam.
Faced with the prospect of a camping trip shortly, I was wondering what the absolute minimum of a tent might be. I remembered the sleeping coffin and understood immediately that such a thing must surely already exist in the realms of camping.
And of course, it does:
It’s true… The bivouac sack (or “bivy” sack) is merely a weatherproof cover for your sleeping bag with a breathing hole — the perfect bear burrito, filled with your ambitions to complete those ultralight objectives.
It’s more of a body bag than a coffin. Perfect!
So, you’d pack a rolled-up sleeping bag and one of these “bear burritos” then sleep where you drop. Obviously this is intended for ramblers and adventurers rather than culture vultures like me who visit cities to see art galleries and opera. But how bad could it be? Sleeping in one of these in a cosy alley or a public park?
Well, it could be absolutely terrible, obviously. And dangerous. And yet…
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The ideas in Issue 16 — Footloose and Facy-Free — are better than this one. Get your copy here.
Nature is Not in it
This is Enrico Monacelli writing in the Quietus last year about the previously mentioned After Work by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek:
Work sucks. It just does. Especially in the state that we’re in: a good job is harder and harder to come by. Let alone a good job that gives you the time and means to enjoy all the things that make a life worth living: a nice place to rest your head, quality time with those you love and free time to idly cultivate those very talents and aspirations that makes you human in the first place. More and more people feel like life is being sucked out of them just to get by. Work lingers throughout each aspect of our daily life like a horrid Thing that gnaws at our very vitality.
and
A job is a way to force you to schedule your hours and organize your life entirely around capitalism’s every demand, leaving no space to your autonomous ability to enjoy or do whatever you like. There’s no pointing in reforming work or creating better jobs then: an oppressive system of total domination remains an oppressive system of total domination no matter how much you ameliorate it.
That’s true!
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Letter to the Editor: Right Where I Itch
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Reader U writes:
I’m a new subscriber and after reading Issue 16 I have to say this Henry Gibbs fella is scratching me right where I itch. How can I read more of his notes?
He reminds me of Mark Boyle, whose The Way Home: A Life Without Technology is certainly worth a read.
Kind regards,
U
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Thanks!
He’s the real deal, our Henry. His column appears in Issues 14, 15, 16 and (this coming December) 17.
14 is available only in digital;
15 is available in digital, but if you wait there will be some shop returns;
16 is still available in print;
17 will be available to pre-order next month.
We like Mark Boyle here at the magazine too, and I happen to know that The Way Home is one of the few books Henry himself owns a copy of.
RW
