Mercantile Filth
Does freedom exist? Yes, it can be bought: people who have money are free. They can afford to do what they want when they want — and that is freedom, which, we are often told, is happiness.
This is from Service, a brand new novel set in LA’s Echo Park district by John Tottenham. Big thanks to the New Escapologist reader who recommended it.
Tottenham’s embittered protagonist struggles daily with his bookstore job, a mountain of debt, gentrification, and his failure to find a state of mind condustive to writing. It’s brilliant. It’s Black Books but furious. Blacker Books then.
It contains many an exquisite Workplace Woe from the service industry:
There are seven or eight steps involved in a credit card transaction, and the entire procedure, from the moment of it being handed over to the printing of the receipt, takes approximately thirty seconds — often longer, if as is so often the case, the machine is malfunctioning. I handle roughly two hundred of these transactions a week, which amounts to at least an hour and a half a week — no less than seventy-five hours: three full days; nine full work days a year — spent processing and handling these items of mercantile filth.
And some top-notch bathtub writing too.
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Letter to the Editor: You Didn’t Make the Cut
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Joshua from The Minimalists writes:
Howdy, Joshua from The Minimalists here. You didn’t make the cut.
A couple years ago, I made a quiet decision: I removed more than 100,000 inactive subscribers from The Simple Newsletter to keep it affordable, intentional, and clutter-free.
You’re reading this email because you were one of those people.
Since then, I’ve completely rebuilt the newsletter from the ground up. It’s still free — but now it’s simpler, more thoughtful, and far more useful.
So I want to welcome you back.
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Dear Joshua. How fucking dare you?
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Get all the minimalism you’ll ever need in the pithy pages of Escape Everything! instead. Or indeed our newsletter, for which, you’ll be happy to know, you made the cut.
Let People Be Free
Regular readers of this blog will know our position that Universal Basic Income (UBI) is (a) a likely solution for societies who want to abolish Wage Slavery and (b) an illustration of what happens when you let people be free instead of forcing them into undignified jobs that waste everyone’s time and energy.
In one of the best UBI pilot schemes I’ve seen so far (one with results so promising that it was recently made permanent, albeit in a cautious and limited way), there are some nice qualitative findings.
Only months into the scheme, I found out I was pregnant. The basic income helped me decide to have my baby, knowing I could continue creative work and keep my small studio space
The basic income gave me more freedom to experiment in my work, to write for independent publications and engage with community initiatives. I helped to create events that brought together artists across forms and raised money for a local rape crisis centre.
Before introducing this scheme, Ireland ranked among the lowest in the 27 countries of the EU for spending on culture. In 2022, that amounted to €897m, or 0.2% of GDP, compared with an EU average of 0.5%. A basic income for 2,000 artists increases Ireland’s spending by only about €35m a year, which would be offset by economic gains.
Yet again we see that when people are left to their own devices instead of being economically bullied into bullshit jobs, the advantages to the person and to society are huuuuge.
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Please support our Kickstarter to get Escape Everything! back into bookshops and libraries.
Escape Everything! Tenth Anniversary Edition
It was a LANDMARK book about how to escape the daily grind of work, consumerism, loneliness and despair. It was also very funny and written by an absolute wizard.
As of this afternoon, this is happening.
Thank you for taking part in my latest madcap scheme.
RTO? Just Say No
From an item in The Register (whose slogan, incidentally, used to be “Biting the hand that feeds IT”):
Despite high-profile calls for employees to get their butts back behind their desks in a traditional workplace setting, more people – at least in the UK – are ignoring return-to-office mandates, a study has found.
and:
Just 42 percent said they’d listen to their bosses and go back onsite for five days a week. This is down from the 54 percent that said they’d comply with requests in early 2022.
You read that correctly. They’re just not listening to their bosses. It’s genius. Why stick it the The Man when you can just ignore him and get on with your work? Truly, they are the new Bartleby.
Tech firms were previously warned they risk losing their best talent if they order employees to work from the office, and there is seemingly no benefit to productivity or the bottom line for corporations that do so.
Indeed. We all know why they want their workers back. It’s control.
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Take control of your own life with New Escapologist. Issue 18 is available now.
Letter to the Editor: Change Your Thought Patterns
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Reader O writes:
I recently found myself in the position of being let go from my job, but with the fortunate benefit of a couple of months of gardening leave.
One of the first things I did was to re-read Escape Everything! for some inspiration. Being a father of a small child, I don’t have the option to “fly somewhere vibrant and cheap,” which did sound like a wonderful plan.
I would very much like to capture the essence of that plan nonetheless and start thinking about building a cottage industry. Do you have any thoughts on how to capture the essence of flying somewhere vibrant and cheap, while remaining at home?
My interpretation of the travel part of the escape plan is that it’s intended to recharge one’s batteries while also disrupting the status quo to change your thought patterns and give rise to new ideas.
Do you have any thoughts on how to achieve this when confined to the same everyday life, but with nine hours of free time on my hands?
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Your situation sounds pretty good. A period of paid leave and, hopefully, some cash in the bank for an escape fund make for a strong hand. You have what most people do not have: time.
For the cottage industry element of your plan, you’ll need to have a think about your creative interests and look to how other people tend to monetise similar. Also, how you can be different to them — what your contribution to the world might be — and where your audience are.
You can’t travel for the mini-retirement I suggest in the book, so you’re asking absolutely the right question: how can you distil the benefits of such a trip into everyday life? You’ve also identified precisely what those benefits are: a recharge, a disruption, new thought patterns.
Escaping to a different city for a while, especially the “vibrant and cheap” sort of place I mention in the book allows you to cut some new pathways in the brain and some new passages through the air. Maybe reading some new books markedly different to the ones you’d normally read could help. The trouble is, being in, say, Valletta for the first times means that such novelty is ambient where books require your concentration.
I’d say the most important thing is not to waste your time off. I don’t mean you need to be productive and start your cottage industry: I mean that your recharge at least should be deep. Don’t watch daytime television: it saps the soul. Don’t spend your precious time on social media. Play with your children, read books, cook, dawdle, go for leisurely walks, experience nature, hear the sound of a river. Allow opportunities for disruption take you by surprise. Maybe you can take your children somewhere, just another town in your country, for a few days? When was the last time you went to the zoo?
Good luck with it all. And please do send us another Letter to the Editor or even an article when you have a story to tell.
Journal Club
A few years ago, I made one of those pros and cons lists, weighing up whether I should stay in my tedious but stressful job, or whether I should leave and do something more interesting. The worst thing on the “leave” list was “might have to come back with my tail between my legs asking for my old job back, if nothing else works out.” In contrast, the worst thing on the “what happens if I stay” list was “may have a stroke as I’m so stressed.”
This is from one of our columnists in New Escapologist Issue 18.
Michael C is an academic who wades into the real research on our fanciful-sounding Escapological claims.
In the latest instalment of his Journal Club column, he asks if workplace stress is really bad for your health.
Hint: it is.
But the short and fascinating journey Michael takes us on is a fun one.
Proper Job
Further to yesterday’s post about Jay Griffiths, the Idler asked Jay in 2015 if she’d ever had a proper job:
I’m so glad you asked that! I was talking to a friend about this recently because she is living in a shed (and I’ve lived in a shed and the winters are brutal). We agreed that we’d endure anything rather than give ourselves over to The Man and get a proper job.
Well said.
(I don’t know if that friend is Catrina Davies, but it definitely and obviously is.)
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Take Flight
This was the calling, the vehement, irresistible demand of the feral angel — take flight. All that is wild is winged — life, mind and language — and knows the feel of air
These quotes come from Wild (2006), a travel book that proposes a rewilding of the heart, by Jay Griffiths.
Escapological? Yes:
I was following that wild call, familiar to us all: the young, the old, the sad, the curious, the footloose and all who yearn just to bugger off for a while.
She then explains that the footloose appetite is “an ancient need, made heroic in the past,” exemplified by the wanderings of knights and shamans.
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Limping
The book begins with a spectacular fall. Our protagonist has escaped prison. She has scaled the wall (we do not witness the clamber, only the fall) and then dropped thirty feet to freedom. The cost of freedom, it becomes clear, is a broken ankle, the titular astragalus bone. After an initial triumph of escape artistry, she must conduct the rest of her getaway limping.
This is from a review of Albertine Sarrazin’s Astragal (1965) in New Escapologist Issue 18.
That’s right, we review old books as well as recent ones!
The idea is that good artworks, perhaps especially books, are forever. We don’t have to live on the razor’s edge of the present, no matter what other media would seem to imply. In books, all history is our playground. That’s the whole point of writing things down really.
Rediscover the lost escape classics in our hot new issue by ordering your copy today.
