What Do People Do All Day?


As you know, I am amused by Richard Scarry.

I like his style — it’s beautiful — but I’m skeptical of his idealistic obsession with manic and uneneding labour. It’s all in good fun but there’s also a sinister calvinism just beneath the surface. “Children are workers too” reads a page of his What Do People Do All Day?. Look into the eyes of that fireman cat and you’ll see the abyss.

Does “busyiness” necesarily need to be “work.” i.e. at one with the jobs the system? Perhaps that’s a question for another day.

Reader Andrew shares this short article with us. It’s a month old now because I’m a bum.

[As a child] I was terrified of being left alone, terrified of the dark, scared of UFOs and, perhaps most trickily, stricken by the existential panic of not knowing what to do with myself. It seemed to me entirely possible that at any time someone was going to take a look at me, realise I had no idea how I was going to spend my days and permanently send me to the naughty corner of life (ie, I’d end up an accountant).

For that reason, the title of [Richard] Scarry’s book was both a horrifyingly loaded question (“What do YOU do all day?”) and a soothing promise that if I read the tome, I would understand exactly how I was meant to spend my time.

The article is about the joy of “little jobs” — errands — as distinct from a career.

I’m not sure how practical it is to seek out little jobs as your main activity in life without also fretting about money all the time or becoming tied up in some sort of precariat scam administered by a Deliveroo-type company, but maybe I haven’t thought about it enough. There are probably ways. I’ve vouched for temping before. My friend Henry gets by with casual cash-in-hand gardening work.

The beauty of a little job is that it is disconnected from the culture of “career as self-worth and identity” that capitalism thrusts upon us. We are encouraged to think that our careers explain us totally – how often we get asked, “What do you do?” as though that will make us comprehensible to the world. But little jobs are not seen as tied to our souls in this way. […] A little job is healing; it allows us to divide the unbearable wash of our days into neat little segments, transforming our lives into oranges that we may peel and eat slice by slice.

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Coached

Tom Grundy recently interviewed me for his newsletter. Tom is a coach and New Escapologist columnist with a particular interest in personal development and working life. He’s also just a lovely chap who cares about the world. He escaped his own day job too.

Anyway, Tom asked me some great questions about the good life, consumerism, mental health, and the escape from work. Join Tom’s newsletter here if you’d like to to check out the interview. Part 1 begins on Tuesday.

Hawkeye

As a kid, I never liked M*A*S*H. That melancholy theme tune and the khaki-and-sand visuals switched me right off.

What a stupid kid!

I’m watching the show now, at last. I can’t believe (a) how good it is, (b) how much of it there is, and, (c) where Hawkeye has been all my life.

I think I’m a little bit in love with him. As well as actually finding him quite sexy, he’s a genius.

He spends most of his time in a dressing gown, just like I do, and he’s rigged up a gin still in his tent so he can enjoy off-duty martinis in the desert.

He seduces all the nurses. He’s a wisenheimer. He tweaks the nose of authority and stands against meanness.

In one episode, when asked about his dressing gown by a colonel, he says “well I tried sleeping in my uniform, but the medals kept sticking in me.”

And thats’ the thing. He has medals. He can be a slob because, like Sherlock Holmes, he’s lightyears ahead of anyone else. He’s a great wit, a happy drunk, and a lounge lizard – but he’s also an excellent surgeon, which is how he gets away with it all.

I love him. He’s the Bugs Bunny of the Korean War. Which doesn’t sound sexy, but somehow it is.

I love you, Hawkeye. My new idol. I’m sorry it took me so long to find you.

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NEW ESCAPOLOGIST ISSUE 17:
ALL THE WAY HOME

Don’t Be Like Sitcom Man

There’s a BBC radio sitcom called There is No Escape:

a sitcom about a man dissatisfied with his life, whose feeble attempts to run away invariably end with him traipsing home defeated.

Sounds great!

Unfortunately it’s rubbish. Not only is it deeply unfunny, its overriding tone is “bicker.” Every moment seems to be two people nagging, belittling each other, acting according to immediate self-interest, making sarcastic remarks about previous sarcastic remarks. In four hours, there is no other tone.

I took GCSE drama at school and, before we learned anything, we’d sometimes default to this argumentative tone. This was probably because we were erroneously looking to create “drama” between two people instead of creating remarkable situations for them. Or maybe argument was just part of our difficult lives outside drama class so it was something we could easily reach for in the heat of the moment. Whatever the reason, an early lesson of GCSE drama was not to bicker, that there are other ways to exchange information (between actors and between actors and audience).

Even when I realised I was not going to enjoy There is No Escape, I thought I’d at least be able to tell you about some failed (fictional) escapes. Trouble is, he doesn’t really make any serious bids for escape at all. He does, however, have some character flaws which one imagines would hinder an escape. So let’s focus on those. Here’s how not to be like Sitcom Man.

Sitcom Man competes when he should cooperate. One episode has him struggling against a colleague for a promotion, despite the fact that promotion won’t solve his problems (he’ll still be employed by the market research company he despises). Escapologists shouldn’t compete in this way. Walk away from the dog-eat-dog workplace and use your calories and mindpower with others in service of something better. It’s not easy. But competing for promotion will not help you or anyone else.

Sitcom Man is lazy when it comes to finding solutions to his problems. His disappointment at a local shop’s failure to provide good food–“frozen turkey dinosaurs” being their typical fare–does not lead to the idea that he could set up a system by which he no longer depends on the hopeless shop simply because it is the nearest one. Growing his own veg, ordering a veg box, even just shopping online at shitting Tesco do not occur to him. That would require a modicum of imagination and a few minutes of application.

Sitcom Man hates when he should love. Actually, he doesn’t even seem to know what love is. Sitcom Man can’t get along with his girlfriend. To this I’d say: she’s not your girlfriend, Sitcom Man. You do not have a romantic relationship. If you have a perpetually oppositional stance against the person who lives with you and sees herself your partner, you’re failing them at the most fundamental level. In what way is this person your “girlfriend,” Sitcom Man? Explain yourself.

Sitcom Man falls back on old habits when he should be creative. It’s the old thinly-written sitcom problem of characters never learning, never trying anything twice. He complains and mopes and never accepts responsibility. Much like his writer who somehow never learned the basic lesson of allowing characters to speak without arguing, Sitcom Man fails to use the tools presumably available in his universe.

This sitcom is supposed to be about Sitcom Man’s escape attempts but he doesn’t try to make a break in any meaningful way; he just reacts pathetically to miserable events and ultimately accepts them. It’s a long way from Reginald Perrin, a far-older sitcom in which a middle-aged executive with a meaningless job and an unfulfilling family life realises he’s been robbed of his youth and takes exciting, eccentric action. While we’re making this comparison, I always got the feeling that any conservativism inate to Reggie Perrin was a situational product of its time; There is No Escape seems willfully conservative in its depiction of what it insists is an unalterable status-quo but really isn’t.

The satus-quo depicted in There is No Escape is one in which couples don’t like each other, jobs are to be endured, and turkey dinosaurs are YOUR DINNER, young man.

Or, you know, maybe it’s just supposed to be a pipe through which the funny is pumped into our patiently-waiting ears. They just forgot to run anything down it.

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