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I enjoyed this video about a tiny house in the Scottish Highlands.
In most ways it’s a pretty typical video for this channel, but the model of “have a tiny, safe, minimalist base while also travelling the world” is writ large and sweet.
When viewing YouTube videos, be sure to have the free version of AdBlockPlus installed as a browser extension and take this staggeringly simple precaution against allowing SHITE into your eyeholes.
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New Escapologist Issue 18 is available and shipping now. Go! Go! Go!
The Student Loan Trap
In Escape Everything! ten years ago, I said that student loans (that is: privately-arranged loans to be paid back with interest over the course of a working life) are a trap and should be illegal.
I stand by that. To me, it is a component of a system of indentured servitude in which you must work to pay off an unnecessary debt concocted for someone else’s financial gain.
They hit you while you’re young, before you know better, when you’re vulnerable or desperate and looking for a good start. Their power and presence prevent you from seeing any alternative. They get you on Day One.
The student loans system also ties education formally and systemically to work: get a degree, get a job. Never mind curiosity or self-improvement or the furthering of human capacity. Get thee to the grind and shut your face.
When I wrote that book, student loans were something in the region of £25k. My own student debt after graduating in 2004 was about £6k. Even though it was evil, a student loan was a trap you’d conceivably escape.
Today, the Guardian reports that:
Helen Lambert borrowed £57,000 to go to university and began repaying her student loan in 2021 after starting work as an NHS nurse.
Since then she has repaid more than £5,000, typically having about £145 a month taken from her pay packet. But everything she hands over is dwarfed by the £400-plus of interest that is added to her debt every month, thanks to rates that have been as high as 8%.
Her total outstanding debt had ballooned to more than £77,000 by the end of November, and it is set to get a lot bigger as there are another 25 years left of the 30-year repayment period.
The amounts of money we’re talking about here are staggering. How badly do we (as a society) want kids to want to be nurses? What are you going to make them crawl through?
It is classic Trap technology. Make them pay (twice!) for what they want after creating a system to fully control what they want in first place. Most people can’t see beyond the work/earn system: we lack an adequate vantage point and most people really think they want to work, to the extent that you can charge them for it. With interest. For thirty years.
In other words: unless you’re an impossibly high earner, you’re in a pitcher plant.
Luckily, there’s a solution of sorts. Don’t try to pay the loan back. Unpaid student debts are cancelled after 30 years.
Save the Student, a student money website, says that unlike most other types of debt, “it’s not always the best idea to make extra repayments … It’s unlikely you’ll repay your loan in full before it is cancelled, so making the extra repayments just means you’ll be paying back more than you need to in the long run”.
There’s no moral reason to pay back this sort of loan. It shouldn’t have been lent to you in the first place. Your creditor is a large, servitude-enforcing corporation. They won’t be hurt by your failure to pay them back. And, anyway, if you can hurt them you probably should. They’re evil.
Unfortunately, if you’re successful in getting a job, you’ll have to pay some of the loan back because a sum will be deducted automatically from your pay. Even though the loan was privately arranged, the government slurp it out of your earnings as a tax-like deduction. Refusing to work, of course, is a good way to avoid that. But that’s rather a shame when you specifically set out to become a nurse.
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Escape traps like an un-pro. New Escapologist Issue 18 is available now.
LEGALIZE LOITERING
These hideous internet memes come from Da Share Z0ne, which recently passed its tenth anniversary.
If you’re not sure about them, Dazed magazine explains:
Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog, as the old saying goes. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process. […] That’s especially true for a gag operating on so many concentric levels of irony as Da Share Z0ne, for whom the frog metaphor here, a mixture of badass and depressing, is particularly apt
They’re also resolutely (and relentlessly) on the side of Escapologists:
Wanted: Your Letters and Woes
There’s ages until the next issue of New Escapologist (Issue 18 is still fresh and tasty) but there are no Letters to the Editor or Workplace Woes in the tank yet.
Workplace Woes is an opportunity for readers to anonymously blow off steam about their jobs, past or present.
Letters to the Editor is a place to tell your escape story in brief, to tell us about your unusual living conditions, to recommend a book or film or other cultural production to your fellow Escapologists, to suggest proven money-saving tips, or to say something about an item from a previous issue.
Please keep your Letters and Woes to 250 words or fewer (or allow yourself to overrun on the understanding they’ll likely be trimmed). Items for either formar can be funny or anger-inducing or informative or all of the above.
It’s always particularly nice to receive Woes from the worlds of retail or hospitality or from the outdoorsy professions (e.g. from farming or the construction industry), but if your story is simply office-based then that’s good too!
Thanks everyone. Over to you.
A Genuine Life Skill
Here’s a lovely quote — rivalling even that one from Marc Maron — from comedian and travel writer Dom Joly:
One of the things I’ve discovered in my search for happiness is the joy and the power of quitting, of running away. I actually think it’s a real skill … It’s a genuine skill to be able to cut your losses and leave when you think, hey, that’s not working. Let’s try something else. I think that’s a genuine life skill. One of my great joys in life … is just thinking I can run away.
Later in the same interview he deepens the mystery of the Irish Goodbye:
It’s called a French exit, which I think is a bit mean to the French, but I love just suddenly thinking, you know what? I’ve gone to a party with my wife and I’ve just thought, fuck this, and I’ve just gone. And then she’ll text me and say, where are you? I say I’m at home watching telly. It’s one of the great joys in life. It’s very selfish. But yeah, that’s what I like.
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Run away! But take New Escapologist magazine with you. We’ll escape together.
Irish Goodbye
What the heck is an “Irish Goodbye?” Apparently it’s a common phrase in America but as someone who lives really close to Ireland I’d never heard it before.
American newspaper The Irish Star explains:
the Irish Goodbye is leaving somewhere without letting people know that you’re going to do so. Many have speculated that Irish people tend to do this at the end of parties more so than other folk, which could have some credence to it.
Others feel there may be a more sinister tone to the term, and that it’s a reference to the stereotype that Irish people tend to be so drunk at the end of parties, that they are in no position to say goodbye.
Oh, okay.
Well, racism aside, I love to leave without saying goodbye. It’s one of life’s great pleasures. Do it at parties always. Do it when quitting jobs if you’re adventurous. Maybe don’t do it at all, but keep the Irish Goodbye in your heart somewhere, never forgetting you can just go.
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All You Have To Do is Go!
Money is always among the top excuses why people don’t go out to experience the world. It’s easy to fall back on and has the bonus of drumming up a bit of pity for yourself while disparaging the perceived privileges of others. But the only real excuse is fear. The fear of uncertainty, the fear of being uncomfortable, the fear of being vulnerable. Don’t pay the fear tax by keeping yourself in an expensive bubble when you venture out.
All you have to do is to go!
New Escapologist contributor Heather Delaney strikes again. Her guide to low-cost long-term travel is brilliant.
You won’t want to do every last thing she suggests, but she knows what she’s talking about. Think about the ethic of what she’s saying.
Non-Escapologists never get to grips with the fantastical truth that you really can go (almost) anywhere and do (almost) anything. You don’t need lots of money. You don’t really need much of anything:
Wherever you’re going, people survive there in jeans! You don’t want to look like you’re ready to summit Mount Kilimanjaro while getting espresso next to a little abuelita in Madrid.
Once you have a backpack (the only travel essential, imo), if you are going to any sort of large city, they will have everything you need there.
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Mandate THIS!
The office was full of distractions, and I found it difficult to focus. People were frequently pulling me into unnecessary meetings or taking calls around me. Also, I function best when I have a snack every two hours or so. At the office, I was too self-conscious to eat, so I spent hours trying to distract myself from my hunger instead of working.
Thanks to Reader J for drawing our attention this brilliant piece from the Walrus, a magazine I used to read in Canada. “One for the Escapological archives,” says J, and they’re not wrong.
Big Canadian organisations — including the government and the banks — are apparently enforcing something called RTO mandates, RTO meaning “return to office.”
They’re forcing people back into offices (and therefore back into cars and onto commuter trains) who have been working perfectly well at home since the pandemic (which, really, was over half a decade ago now — and weren’t we all supposed to embrace “the new normal?”).
I love that calling it an “RTO mandate” puts an official- and therefore important- and respectable-sounding sheen on what is little more than a mass yank of the leash. The writer of the piece, Kathy Chow, agrees:
I suspect the real motivation behind RTO mandates has nothing to do with productivity or company culture and everything to do with control. That is what the modern office was designed for, after all.
There’s more. Enjoy.
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Obvious Tech Tip
You know me. I like to give tips to help you escape the mire of social media and, where possible, get back to to the Old Web.
Today’s tip isn’t about the Old Web exactly but it concerns the quality of everyday online experience. It’s this:
Don’t link to the YouTube homepage and don’t visit YouTube by typing “yout” into your address bar. And obviously don’t Google it like a dumbass. Create a link or a bookmark instead to your YouTube subscriptions page.
I can’t believe it took me so long to think of this. Manage your subscriptions wisely and you’ll never again see any of the 20%+ of YouTube videos that are AI slop.
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It Seems Furious That We’re Free
These quotes come from a short escape story (published in The End of the World as We Know it: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand) called “The African Painted Dog” by Catriona Ward.
The titular wild animals escape a New York zoo by clambering up a fallen tree during a thunderstorm:
Below, the sparkling black snake leaps and lashes at the water, as if angry it can’t reach us. It seems furious that we’re free. So we get up and dance on our hind legs and shout down at it all, water an snake, dancing in the rain. Thunder and rain pounds at us, but we’re part of it now.
and
Even though we’re afraid of the storm, everything in my nose and body is shouting. The feel of the new ground beneath our feet. The scents all around, the wide-open space, no longer surrounded by rock walls. New, new, new!
and
I am Chachacha the snake eater and escapee, explorer of new worlds.
That’s good shit.
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